Vertical Wind Shear and Turbulence Detection Using Doppler Lidar and Radiosonde at NARO Space Center in South Korea

 Atmospheric turbulence mainly induced by Vertical Wind Shear (VWS) can alter significantly the accurate positioning of space launching vehicles due to any possible distortions in their heading angles during their early stages of the flights. In this study, we developed the observation-based real-time detection system of the objective magnitude of atmospheric turbulence derived from the VWS near the NARO Space Center (NSC) in South Korea for ensuring successful launch missions of currently planned and future space vehicles. Here, we estimated an objective turbulence intensity, as a function of Eddy Dissipation Rate (EDR) that is converted from the VWS based on directly measured wind data from a Doppler wind lidar and intensive field experiments of radiosondes at the NSC for launching missions. First, we applied rigorous quality control (QC) of wind observation data to remove and filter out spurious wind data, which resulted in a high degree of agreement between the radiosonde and Doppler wind lidar measurements. This allowed us to calculate more reliable VWS to be converted to EDR using the lognormal mapping technique. Probability density functions (PDFs) of the VWS in different seasons and altitudes were established, and then used to construct the best-fit curves of prescribed lognormal function by minimizing the root mean square errors from the actual PDFs. Using the mean and standard deviation of these best-fit curves, the relationships between VWS and EDR were finally obtained and used to develop a real-time EDR estimation algorithm based on the observed wind data at the NSC. Newly developed real-time EDR estimation will provide a critical information to make a final Go or No-Go decision of the launching missions by rapidly detecting VWS-based EDR signals at the NSC site.

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program under Grant KMI2022-00310 and the NARO Space Center Advancement Project of Korea Aerospace Administration.