HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. – Weather Engineering Facility workers here installed a Common Data Logger, CDL, on the two most prevalent fixed-base Air Force weather sensors and created a single language for multiple variations of systems all over the world.
The equipment, which looks like three sealed toolboxes installed near the base of 30-foot-tall weather sensor stations, translates information pouring down cables from the sensor towers. Previously proprietary sensors generated all the data in their own languages and on separate communication ports.
The logger takes all these languages and processes them into informative displays Airmen use to track real-time conditions and generate forecasts at 187 airfields worldwide.
“Without the CDL, we don’t own the technical baseline,” said 2nd Lt. Alec O’Connor, an engineer at Hanscom’s Weather Engineering Facility, or WEF, that hosts a half-dozen weather stations in one place for experiments, innovation and testing.
“This was a two-day install process for each system, and at the end of it, the government owns the rights to all the information and all the data generated by the station,” he added. “That gives us the ability to get creative with how we format and display the data, and just gives us a lot more authority over how to set the system up to perform as well as possible.”
Program personnel expect the Air Force to realize more than $3 million in savings because the CDL can be configured to communicate with newer and readily available sensors, eliminating the need to replace sensors currently used by the weather stations with similar obsolete or proprietary versions. This will also allow the weather stations to evolve to a common baseline of weather sensors in the future.
The data logger has military-standard-grade ports for laptops, and can withstand sustained winds near 100 knots and gusts of more than 130 knots. It works with Fixed Base Weather Observing System models AN/FMQ-19 and AN/FMQ-22, which together make up most types of fixed weather stations. These weather systems aid in air operations at locations worldwide, and each location has one or more, to provide accurate information across large areas.
The first CDL install was a prototype at Hanscom, but the logger will serve as the baseline starting in 2020. Over the course of three years, installation kits will be delivered to 187 airfields for 229 Fixed Base Weather Observing Systems to upgrade to the data logger.
“User feedback matters a lot for everything we do,” said Steven Taskovics, a MITRE Corp. team member working at the WEF. “We have Air Combat Command users, maintainers and testers from the 557th Weather Wing’s operational testing unit here regularly, verifying what we’re doing and giving us and the vendor requests and refinements.”
After installation, the WEF will continue its mission of finding new ways to improve airfield weather reports and forecasts for combatant commanders.