Airport Business - 39

TECHNOLOGY
technologies provide airport staff with
near real-time critical information to
make informed decisions about treating,
clearing and maintaining various airport
surfaces.
IN-PAVEMENT SENSORS
These embedded sensors measure the
pavement surface temperature, the
surface state, and the presence and
concentration of chemical present to help
determine when ice will start to form.
They are often embedded along a runway,
generally where planes touch down and
take off and at various points in between
those positions. Additionally, these
sensors can also be installed to monitor
the surface conditions on taxiways.
SUBSURFACE TEMPERATURE
PROBES
Subsur face temperat ure probes
provide decision-makers with a crucial
understanding of what's going on
underneath the pavement's surface. These
sensors are designed to be installed below
the surface at a recommended depth of 12
inches. These probes measure the ground
temperature and if thermal energy
exists that could help prevent icing,
leveraging that information to predict
future pavement surface temperatures
and whether snow will begin to stick or
if frost or ice will start forming.
ATMOSPHERIC SENSORS
Atmospheric sensors are designed to
provide measures of air temperature,
dew point, precipitation, wind speed
and direction, visibility and other
atmospheric constituents. Atmospheric
conditions have a significant impact on
pavement conditions.

Before the Storm
Fortunately, bad weather is rarely a
surprise to airport decision-makers.
Before most people even know a storm
is coming, airport teams have been
preparing and planning for the worst.
Whether assembling the snow and
ice team, getting equipment ready or
monitoring winter weather, snow and
ice maintenance requires a significant
amount of organization to ensure the
safety and efficiency of airport operations.
With 24/7 access to weather
information through various providers,

such as Nationa l Ocean ic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
and the National Weather Service,
airport staff are able to effectively watch
the weather in advance of any winter
storm. Flexible and customizable to an
airport's particular needs, forecasts are
typically delivered every day, including
daily outlooks, 24-hour forecasts and 2-5
day forecasts.
Forecasting conditions is critical
to performing winter maintenance
operations that reduce the risks posed
by hazardous runway conditions.
Recognizing when to prepare for an icing
event or a winter storm can save money
and resources, and modern software can
provide a traditional atmospheric weather
forecast, as well as a prediction of runway
surface conditions.
By combining current observations
from the stationary runway weather
information system (RWIS) and
predicted weather conditions, software
solutions are able to provide a baseline for
the forecast. This means decision-makers
at the airport can quickly determine how
well a forecast is performing and whether
any short-term adjustments are needed
to make confident decisions about the
effects of winter weather.
When airport crews know a winter
weather event is coming in, providing it
does not begin with rain that would wash
the chemical away, they can pretreat the
runway to prevent snow and ice from
bonding to the runway surface and make
it easier to remove. As such, knowing
what the atmospheric parameters,
pavement temperature and surface state
will be at any given moment is of crucial
importance - and forecasting helps
provide reliable weather data in advance
of the storm.

During a Winter Weather
Event
During winter weather events, runway
capacity often slows down, baggage
handlers have to exercise an additional
level of caution planes have to be
de-iced before taking off and runways
may need to be shut down periodically
so plows, snowblowers and brooms can
get them back to a safe state. It's crucial
that ground crews and operations teams
work in coordination. While airport
operations personnel do their best to

keep airports running in winter weather,
snowstorms can impact an airport's
capacity for handling arriving and
departing aircraft, which can result in
cancelled flights. Consequently, having
real-time, accurate and reliable weather
information is of vital importance to
make decisions surrounding winter
weather-related challenges.
Airports also require intelligence
surrounding how the runway behaves
in these circumstances. Believe it
or not, the effectiveness of de-icing
chemicals is determined by the surface
temperature and not the air temperature.
With RWISs consisting of in-pavement
sensors, subsurface temperature probes
and a full suite of atmospheric sensors,
airport decision-makers are able to
collect and process both weather and
runway data that provides accurate and
reliable information to improve the
timing of airport maintenance de-icing
applications.
The FAA's Takeoff and Landing
Performance Assessment (TALPA)
initiative reduces the risk of runway
overruns by providing airport operators
with a method to accurately and
consistently determine runway conditions
when a paved runway is not dry. The
traditional method of conducting such
measurement using a friction wheel is
essentially subjective, but new software
systems combining mobile sensors that
can be mounted on any snowplow and
smartphone applications are better
aligned with TALPA procedures than
those provided by friction measurement
devices to provide eff icient, FAAcompliant runway condition reporting.
Mobile and RWIS sensors produce
runway condition data and assessment
to support decision-making in real time
during any kind of weather event. In
addition, advances in technology allow
different inspectors to consistently assess
and report on runway conditions, freeing
them to concentrate on other condition
factors, such as foreign object damage
risks, accelerating the normal GRF
workflow. This minimizes the amount of
time inspectors have to spend on runways
making surface assessments, which
improves airport capacity and helps to
maintain normal operations, even in the
midst of the most severe winter weather
events. 

APRIL 2020 \ AVIATIONPROS.COM / 39
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Airport Business

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