Aircraft wake is a pair of counter-rotating vortices generated behind the aircraft, which can greatly impact the safety of fast takeoff and landing of aircraft and limit the improvement of airport capacity. The current wake parameter retrieval methods cannot locate the wake vortex's position and estimate its strength level in real time. To deal with this issue, a novel algorithm based on YOLOv5s deep learning network is proposed. The new algorithm establishes single vortex locating concept to adapt the wake vortex's evolution at complicate background wind field conditions, and proposes strength-based classification standard which can represent the real-time hazard of wake vortex to shorten the takeoff and landing intervals. Meanwhile, EIOU loss function is introduced to improve the precision of YOLOv5s network. Compared with the state-of-the-art object detection approaches, such as Cascade R-CNN, FCOS, and YOLOv5l, the superiority of new method is demonstrated in terms of accuracy and robustness by using the field detection data from Hong Kong International Airport.

Fine-scale wind field nowcasting is of great significance in air traffic management, power grid operation, and so on. In this article, an indirect wind field nowcasting scheme based on lidar observation is presented, which contains an encoder-forecaster network based on the convolutional long short-term memory with balanced structure and a mask branch. The proposed nowcasting network is trained and evaluated based on the lidar observations throughout 2020 at Hong Kong International Airport. Comprehensive comparison with nine methods including the widely used optical flow technique and classic neural network show the good performance of the new network. It can capture the spatio-temporal features in the lidar observations and obtain better nowcasting results up to 27 min with a resolution of 100 m. The nowcasting errors are smaller than the retrieval errors reported in recent literature, demonstrating that the lidar observation nowcasting based on the new network can get fine-scale wind field nowcasting results with high efficiency.

The uniform and linear wind models have been commonly used for wind field retrieval in meteorological community. However, the accuracy and robustness of the retrieval results can be quite unsatisfactory due to the mismatch between these models and the real wind distribution, especially under complex wind conditions. In this article, a nonlinear model based on high-order Taylor expansion is proposed to deal with this limitation, and the combination of ridge regression and decomposition-iteration process (denoted as Ridge-DI method) is further introduced to solve the model with high accuracy and robustness. A case study on simulation and field experiment shows that the proposed method with the third-order Taylor expansion can reduce the mean root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of the retrieved velocities by more than 16.84% in comparison with traditional methods.

Highly variable wind fields (HWFs), which usually have drastically changing velocities over time, can seriously impact aviation safety, wind energy assessment, and so on. A recently proposed deep learning method can well predict the wind fields in ordinary cases, but its performance deteriorates when HWFs are involved. In this letter, a nowcasting method taking into account the impact of HWFs is proposed. First, standard deviations (SDs) of the lidar observations within a time interval are used to identify highly variable events. Second, a loss function weighted by the SDs is adopted to train the nowcasting neural network. Additionally, a new dimensionless metric is introduced to quantitatively measure the nowcasting performance with emphasis on HWFs. Experimental results demonstrate that the weighted loss function can efficiently improve the nowcasting performance on HWFs such as the initiation and dissipation processes of wind shear. Compared with the original nowcasting method, the network with the weighted loss function can reduce the nowcasting errors by an improvement of more than 15.2% in terms of the new metric.

Aircraft wake is a pair of strong counter‐rotating vortices generated behind a flying aircraft, which might be dangerous to the following aircrafts. The real‐time and precise locating of aircraft wake vortex‐core positions is essential in the aviation safety field, especially in airport traffic management. This study proposes a two‐step vortex‐core locating method which uses the Gabor filter to make a preliminary locating and the velocity range distribution to make a fine locating consequently. The combination of Gabor filter and Doppler velocity distribution can improve the method's adaptability to complex background wind field and mitigate the impact of noise. Numerical examples and field detection campaigns from Changsha Huanghua International Airport and Hong Kong International Airport have well verified the good performance of the method, in terms of both accuracy and real time.

Accurate marine wind detection under all-weather conditions is crucial for maritime activities. The joint detection of lidar and radar is supposed to be a potential way to carry out the all-weather sensing of wind. However, their performance analysis has not been well studied, particularly in the far sea area, where the wind-tracing particles are quite different from those inland. Based on the particle distributions above the sea surface under different weather conditions, this study investigated the scattering and attenuation effects of lidar and radar waves in open sea areas with the Mie theory and T-matrix method. Then, the maximum detection range and velocity accuracies of lidar/radar were comprehensively analyzed based on detection principles to optimize the combination of lidar and radar. According to the simulation results, it was difficult to maintain the detection capability of a single lidar/radar under all-weather conditions, and 1.55 $\mathsf{\mu }$m lidar and W-band radar presented a promising joint detection scheme, as they exhibited optimal weather adaptability in clear sky and precipitation conditions, respectively.