The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initiated the Terminal Area Surveillance System (TASS) Program several years ago to plan for changes that will be needed as a result of the expected increases in air traffic density within the National Air Space. Maintaining or improving current standards of safety and efficiency is a central goal of the program. Methods included for consideration are advanced radar technology and improved weather hazard detection and forecasting.
In the summer of 1998, the TASS Program will conduct a demonstration of a prototype rapid-update, electronically-scanned (e-scan) radar to test the feasibility of using one radar to perform aircraft tracking and weather surveillance functions. If successful, a radar of this type is seen as a future replacement to the FAA Terminal Doppler Weather Radars and the Airport Surveillance Radars-9 when their operational lifetimes end. The combination of the two functions into one radar system allows considerable cost savings. This prototype e-scan radar is called the Multiple Purpose Airport Radar (MPAR) and is being developed by Lockheed Martin. The demonstration will be conducted at a Lockheed Martin facility near Cazenovia, New York.
The MPAR utilizes an active phased-array antenna to provide pencil beam coverage of desired surveillance volumes for the purpose of aircraft and hazardous weather detection. A high-speed digital signal processor generates aircraft detections/tracks and weather spectral moment estimates for individual radar resolution cells. C. Kessinger and D. Albo plan to utilize the spectral moment estimates to perform hazardous weather classification.