Low-level Windshear and Turbulence for Civil Aviation – An Introduction

This book serves as an introduction of the topic of low level windshear and turbulence for civil aviation. It summarizes the concepts about these wind changes from the perspective of the operation of the aircraft. Then it lists out the common cause of these phenemona, their charateristics and the meteorological equipment that may be used for their detection. The detection algorithms are then described in more details.They include the detection and alerting of windshear and turbulence using anemometers, microwave radars and Doppler LIDARs, which are among the most commonly used equipment for this purpose.Some other instruments such as wind profilers and pressure sensors are briefly discussed. While references are made to the existing literature about the technical details of the algorithhms, the major concepts of the detection and their limitations are described in order to let the readers have a quicker understanding about the main characteristics of the different algorithms. The next topic of the book is about the forecast. At the moment the forecasting of windshear and turbulence is mainly based on mesoscale to microscale meteorological models and CFD models. Their working principles, application areas and example cases are presented. Some other newly developed methods are also briefly described, such as the use of artificial intelligence/machine learning. The book then concludes by discussing the alert integration and prioritization, applications of the methodology to low altitude economy, and possible future research directions. In this setup, the books emphasizes both operational aspect of windshear and turbulence alerting, and the future developments of these topics, so that it is self-contained in content. It is hoped that the book would be a useful reference for aviation weather forecasters, air traffic controllers, airport planners and professionals of related fields. It may serve as an introductory book for postgraduates studying in these topics or conducting scientific research on such aviation hazards.