10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
Hazardous Ice Cloud Avoidance Using Airborne LiDAR Remote Sensors
RICHARD STONE, Justin Fisher, Sigma Space Corporation
Abstract Number: 1317 Working Group: Clouds and Climate
Abstract One particularly costly problem confronting manned and unmanned aircraft operations is icing. Current systems today can only detect icing once an aircraft is in cloud. These methods also do not provide sufficient information about large supercooled water droplets >50 µm) that jeopardize flight by “bleeding” back from the leading contact edges and freeze on the wings and airframe. Better measurements of cloud characteristics and identification of icing potential using remote sensing techniques can reduce icing hazards and threats before an aircraft encounters icing.
RHS Consulting operates an aircraft equipped with a side-looking radiometer (Radiometrics), a Mini Micro Pulse LiDAR (Sigma Space Corporation), and a cloud droplet measurement system (Droplet Measurement Technologies). This plane routinely flies in icing conditions and is being used to investigate winter storm systems by collecting data from each of these systems to investigate instrument performance.
Recent data from these flights shows that Micro Pulse LiDAR measurements by themselves, are sensitive to supercooled liquid and mixed phase clouds at distances up to 10 km, and offer the advantage of direct range observations that do not require ancillary data sets to produce cloud liquid water contents. They also offer the high potential to directly measure hydrometeor particle size distributions. Thus the Micro Pulsed LiDAR technique offers great potential for providing a small low cost solution for detecting icing hazards in supercooled liquid water and mixed phase clouds at distances up to 10km or more. Measurements from the latest flights will be presented and discussed.