1993 KSC Research and Technology Report

Atmospheric Sciences

The Atmospheric Sciences program at the John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) addresses the impacts of weather on ground, launch, and landing processing with a view to increasing safety of personnel, protecting resources, and reducing lost work time by improving detection, analysis, and prediction of weather events and protection from weather events. Many of the weather impacts are of a specialized nature, differing from those felt by the public and even aircraft operations, and require studies or development that crosses the lines of conventional scientific disciplines. Weather events focused upon by the program include lightning and cloud electrification, convective cloud growth, atmospheric surface and planetary boundary layer circulations and processes, wind shear effects, severe weather phenomena, rain, wind, and fog. Short-term attention is being directed to:
  1. Mesoscale numerical weather prediction models
  2. Numerical models for prediction of transport and diffusion of hazardous materials
  3. Improvement and development of detection instrumentation and protection methods
  4. Use of expert knowledge and artificial neural network techniques
  5. Improvement of decisionmaking processes
  6. Improvement of the processing and synthesizing of the voluminous data sets needed for accurate description of weather events and processes to effectively display the information and aid in its assimilation by weather forecasters and operations and safety decisionmakers.
Long-term attention will be given to encouraging the evolution of more powerful numerical prediction models and computer systems, advanced detection and analysis of weather processes, advanced protection methods, and systems to support the processing and protection of future space vehicles and launch systems.

Thunderstorm Hypothesis Reasoner (THOR)

Payload Changeout Room (PCR) Lightning Environment Study

Coordinated Approach to Mesoscale Numerical Weather Prediction


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