Summary
The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Airport Surveillance Radar (ASR-9) is a high-scan-rate system which provides a "critical" function in terms of air traffic control (ATC). In addition to its primary role of air traffic surveillance, the system also generates precipitation data for display on air traffic specialists' radar scopes and for use by automated systems such as the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) and Weather Systems Processor (WSP). Air traffic managers use these data to provide optimum routes for aircraft operating in and near the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) airspace. The primary advantage of the ASR-9 - as an aviation weather radar - over either the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) or the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) is the rapid update rate, i.e., 30 seconds, which provides air traffic managers with a more accurate representation of weather echo location within the sensor's domain. This is far superior toeither the TDWR or NEXRAD, which takes from 2.5 to 6 minutes to create a volume scan, depending on the scan strategy. The sensor is also quite reliable, with limited down time. An analysis of ASR-9 data from the ITWS prototypes has uncovered a number of problems, which impact the quality of the precipitation data. The data quality issues discussed are overly aggressive ground clutter suppression, polarization mode issues, hardware failures associated with high beandlow beam switching, attenuatiodsignal depolarization, beam-filling losses, bright- band contamination, distant weather contamination, calibration issues, and radadantenna failures. The recommendations to address the ASR-9 data quality issues can be grouped into three categories: "Variable Site Parameter (VSP)" adjustments, hardware component maintenance checks, and automated flagging of data quality problems. The report includes discussion of the frequency and characteristics of each degradation, presenting both hardware and non- hardware related problems, and concludes with proposed solutions to the problems and recommendations designed to improve the overall utility of the ASR-9 precipitation data.