Soon, this year’s Inter Airport Exhibition will take place in Munich and Lufft is in the starting blocks. It will be held at Munich Trade Fair from October 6 to 9 and offers an overview of all new airport technologies around the topics Terminal, Data, Ramp and Design. Why a visit of our booth 755 in hall B will be worth it, you can find out via the following entry…
Photo source: airport Bergamo, Italy; Intercom Dr. Leitner
Various weather phenomena play a crucial role in the smooth running of airport operations. These include strong winds, precipitation, fog, smoke, and other factors affecting visual range as well as frost and snow-related weather conditions. According to FAA, 23 percent of global aviation accidents are weather influenced. Also flight delays are often related to the weather.
The sensors provided by Lufft can be integrated into so-called AWOS (automated airport weather stations) systems. This in turn, serve as a decision support (DSS) for the airport responsibles (e.g. towers and pilots).
At this year’s Inter Airport in Munich, we provide you with various sensors covering a wide variety of relevant environmental data: the innovative mobile road weather sensor MARWIS, the stationary surface sensors IRS31Pro– and ARS31Pro–UMB, the cloud height sensor CHM 15k and the compact weather sensor WS700–UMB.
The laser-based CHM 15k Cloud Height sensor measures up to 15 km into the sky and detects up to nine different cloud layers. In addition, it identifies both different aerosol layers and cirrus clouds with an optical density of less than 0.003 within 500 meters layer thickness. It also creates particle backscatter profiles, an index on sky conditions and assesses the vertical visibility.
The innovative mobile road weather sensor MARWIS scans the runway surfaces contactless up to 100 times per second. It detects various road condition parameters such as, the water film height of upt to to six millimeters, the road temperature and ice percentages and calculates the friction. Due to its mobility, it covers measuring points also where no fixed runway sensors are available.
For stationary measurements, in turn, the road sensors IRS31Pro– and ARS31Pro–UMB can be used. They are embedded into the runway surface. The active ARS31Pro detects the freezing temperature by using a Peltier element regardless of the de-icing materials. Supplemented by the passive road sensor IRS31Pro–UMB, it measures, for example, up to four millimeters high water films, the salt concentration and the temperatures. Those two sensors combinde provide reliable information about weather conditions on runways. And they are also easy to maintain: In order to facilitate the maintenance of the invasive probe, their electronics can be separated from the chassis.
The WS700–UMB weather sensor measures environmental weather data and covers a lot of measurement parameters. In one single case with a single cable connection, it combines sensors for detecting the air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation intensity, precipitation, rainfall, air pressure, wind direction, wind speed and global radiation at once.
All mentioned sensors communicate using open protocols such as UMB–ASCII, UMB binary, SDI–12, MODBUS and analog using the DACON digital-analog converter.
Accompanied by ViewMondo, the new monitoring software, the measuring network can be reached through an internet browser from anyhere and the measurement data is presented in a clearly arranged manner. Moreover, the new software includes a runway Condition Code (RCC) workflow, which not only digitized the whole procedure but also replaces rough estimations through reliable sensor data to determine the runway surface status.
Especially with regards to the growing air traffic, the automatic and continuous weather monitoring connected with safety-related decisions at airports will be indispensable in the future.
To get an own picture of the modern airport solutions from Lufft, we cordially invite you to visit us at booth 755 in hall B – we look forward to meeting you!
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