Remote thermal detection

Weather radar can see insects in thermals, if adjusted for weak echos. No need to carry radar on board, just form a composite image from ground based radars and link image data to cockpit. Technology exists already.

On Sun, 02 Oct 2016 12:20:59 -0700, krasw wrote:

Weather radar can see insects in thermals, if adjusted for weak echos.
No need to carry radar on board, just form a composite image from ground
based radars and link image data to cockpit. Technology exists already.

When Maynard Hill[*] was working for NACA/NASA (at Langley I think) a new
radar they'd developed showed mysterious woolly blobs over a nearby
field. He had an idea what they were, refused to say more and went home,
grabbed an RC sailplane and took it plus an RT set out to the field,
launched and had the crew talk his model into the blob. It went up,
proving the radar was spotting thermals. IIRC this story appeared on the
Academy of Model Aeronautics's magazine, Model Aviation. The AMA is the
governing body for American model aviation.

Do any of you know more about this? Esp the frequency the radar used and
how/why it detected thermals.
[*] Maynard Hill was a well-known American RC pilot and record breaker.
He set out to break records because he found that more fun than competing
in any type of organised competition.
https://www.modelaircraft.org/mag/mhill/hillindex.htm

Among other feats he was the first to fly a model aircraft across the
Atlantic. That was done with his self designed and built autonomous
model. To qualify as a model its all-up weight (including fuel) at launch
had to be 5kg or less.

There's an article about his Trans Atlantic Model he
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sp..._Butts%27_Farm



--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

sunnuntai 2. lokakuuta 2016 22.49.17 UTC+3 Martin Gregorie kirjoitti:

Do any of you know more about this? Esp the frequency the radar used and
how/why it detected thermals.

Insects are sucked to thermals from close to ground. These are roughly same size as rain or snow coming down from clouds, so they are visible in weather radar images accordingly, as are birds and larger objects. I believe weather radars operate in centimeter scale wavelength.