Impacts of Numerical Weather Prediction Spatial Resolution on an Atmospheric Decision Aid for Directed Energy Weapon Systems

Abstract

The Airborne Laser (ABL) is being developed as one element of our nation's Ballistic Missile Defense System. The ABL Element Office is developing an Atmospheric Decision Aid (ADA) to diagnose and forecast the location and magnitude of optical turbulence in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Development of the ADA relies on an understanding about the strengths and weaknesses of numerical weather prediction (NwP) models, plus the sensitivity of the optical turbulence algorithms to the NWP spatial and temporal resolution. This case study compared the accuracy and precision of the ADA optical turbulence algorithms to several horizontal and vertical NWP resolutions. Results indicate that for a given vertical resolution using a finer horizontal resolution does not significantly improve the accuracy of the forecast, but for a given horizontal resolution increasing the vertical resolution does improve the forecast accuracy.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA423573

Entities

People

  • Frank H. Ruggiero
  • Kevin P. Roe
  • Randy J. Lefevre

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Airborne
  • Algorithms
  • Ballistic Missiles
  • Case Studies
  • Defense Systems
  • Directed Energy Weapons
  • High Performance Computing
  • Measurement
  • Power Spectra
  • Precision
  • Turbulence
  • Weapon Systems
  • Weapons
  • Weather Forecasting

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy
  • Space