THALES Air Defence, a wholly-owned subsidiary of THALES group, develops and supports complete air security systems and related equipment to meet its customers’ requirements in peacetime, crisis and war. Research and development is a strategic priority for TAD. More than half of its workforce, including 2,500 high-level technical and engineering staff, are involved in R&D projects on a daily basis. As a provider of critical systems, the company fully recognises the importance of world-class quality management: the TAD. quality system has achieved all the leading international accreditation, including AQAP 110, ISO 9001, Tick- It (LQRA) and CMM Level 2.

Expertise & Experience in Weather Radar Domain
The meteorological department from TAD., now “Joint Sensors Radar Unit”, has successfully manufactured operational equipment such as weather radars (ERM86,RODIN), wind speed measurement radars (ZEPHYR),as well as complex systems or subsets for Doppler radars used by scientists to study atmospheric disturbances (RONSARD) or storms mainly in tropical zones.

TAD has participated to 4MIDABLE & ATC-WAKE civil EEC Studies and has promoted a new advanced processing function, called SKEWIND, based on sequence of radar reflectivity images.

In the framework of European ATC-WAKE study, TAD has used DLR’s weather radar data to validate his New Image Processing SKEWIND of Ground Weather Radar (it could also use weather channel of primary ATC radar), that provides dynamic tracking of fluid deformable contours based on advanced technique of morphological skeletons instead of classical centroid method that suffers of one main major drawback that centroid cannot track complex fluid deformation. For ATC-WAKE study, TAD has made tests on sequences of DLR’s POLDIRAD radar reflectivity on SKEWIND to prove the quality & robustness of results.

Estimation of severe precipitation is essential to improve air traffic control operations. Precipitation mapping and tracking & wind field estimation could be displayed on cockpit display for pilot that could warn of potential wake vortex hazards. Precipitation cloud motion estimation provided by SKEWIND will be useful for the forecasting of weather cells thirty minutes in advance and could help pilot to optimize his flight path in coordination with ATC & ATM controller. This task is difficult and a challenge, because during thirty minutes, the morphology of weather cells (their growth and decay) can change considerably because meteorological phenomena are characterized by distributed systems that exhibit motion across a wide spectrum of scales with topological changes. TAD has solved the tracking and forecasting of these evolving dynamic systems by matching morphological skeletons of previous radar reflectivity images, smoothing & interpolating a dense wind field that deforms weather cell shapes and provides a good estimation of their position for the next thirty minutes. 6th RTD Framework Programme 02 February 2005