Integration and Testing of Infill Radars at Travis AFB

One of the most challenging problems for air traffic control radars today is to eliminate the radar clutter produced from wind turbines over wind resource areas. Turbines produce both stationary clutter and Doppler clutter that air surveillance radars process as targets. These false targets are displayed to operators causing confusion and added workload. Furthermore, wind resource areas are expected to continue to grow in the size of the turbines (taller with wider blade diameters) and in land coverage use. One method to alleviate this clutter is the use of infill radars to surveil wind resource areas and thereby supplement current radar coverage. In this paper we introduce the successful Travis Pilot Mitigation Project which explored the use of infill radars for mitigation of this clutter.This recently completed project successfully integrated two primary-only infill radars along with an operational DASR radar into an existing air traffic automation system (STARS—Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System). This integration permits primary only infill radars to simultaneously detect dark targets over the wind resource area along with the operational DASR. These radars feed STARS which then presents fused tracks to an air traffic control operator. In this paper we detail the integration process necessary to achieve this feat which was initially thought impossible to do. We detail how STARS was adapted to each radar to tune its tracking filters for best results. We show the flight patterns used to stress the radars, an example of STARS tracking, and overall results of the integration. Our work is propelling infill radars to further expansion in the National Air Space (NAS) and we show how that came to be.