Quantifying Spatial Separation Error in Tropospheric Wind Measurements

Abstract

Wind measurements from the surface through the troposphere are an important asset for both range and Day of Launch (DOL) operations. Weather balloons have long been used to fulfill this operational need. Decker (2017) found balloons at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) can drift as far as 200 km from the launch site. Curtis et al. (2019) found Root Mean Square (RMS) wind deltas between 0.5 m/s and 6.3 m/s for separations between 30 km and 200 km from KSC using the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) model. The purpose of this study is to validate the model-based results found in Curtis et al. (2019) with observed wind and separation deltas calculated between the NASA Tropospheric Doppler Radar Wind Profiler (TDRWP) and weather balloons.