Atmospheric Sensing for Social & Economic Benefits

When airplanes take off and land, they form wake vortices -- two rotating columns of air trailing behind the aircraft -- that pose a significant risk to other airplanes.  Airport operations and regulations address this risk by spacing out take-offs and landings with implications for airport capacity, economics, and safety.  This research examines whether infrasound microphones can be used to detect the strength and dissipation rate of wake vortices with the goal of improving runway utilization while maintaining safety.  As a first step, infrasound sensors have been placed along the runway at Westover Airforce base to collect data as aircraft ranging from C5A to a Hawker. take off and land.  This data will be used to model and gain an understanding of wake vortices and their dissipation at airfields.

We are testing a potential technique to monitor wake turbulence in order to improve runway utilization, e.g., by decreasing aircraft separation when "early" wake turbulence dissipation has been detected. This project will examine a passive acoustic-based approach where an array of low-frequency microphones is placed along a runway to monitor wake vortices. Being passive, there are no emissions hazards. Being low-frequency acoustic, the sensors are unaffected by rainfall. To prove the general concept, we are deploying 3 infrasound microphones alongside the Westover Airforce Base main runway. First data collection occurred August 2022. To show the feasibility of this approach, further data analysis and additional measurements are required.

Among various considerations that affect path planning, weather may have the most significant
impact, as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are sensitive to weather conditions such as wind, temperature, and precipitation. Our objective is to address this need by developing a decision support system
for UAV path planning under the consideration of stochastic weather evolution.