Observation and Numerical Simulation of Cross-Mountain Airflow at the Hong Kong International Airport from Range Height Indicator Scans of Radar and LIDAR

Apart from headwind changes, crosswind changes may be hazardous to aircraft operation. This paper presents two cases of recently observed crosswind changes from the range height indicator scans of ground-based remote sensing meteorological equipment, namely an X-band microwave radar and a short-range LIDAR. Both instruments have a range resolution down to around 30 m, allowing the study of fine-scale details of the vertical profiles of cross-mountain airflow at the Hong Kong International Airport. Rapidly evolving winds have been observed by the equipment in tropical cyclone situations, revealing high levels of turbulence and vertically propagating waves. The eddy dissipation rate derived from radar spectrum width indicated severe turbulence, with values exceeding 0.5 m2/3 s−1. In order to study the feasibility of predicting such disturbed airflow, a mesoscale meteorological model and a computational fluid dynamics model with high spatial resolution are used in this paper. It is found that the mesoscale meteorological model alone is sufficient to capture some rapidly evolving airflow features, including the turbulence level, the waves, and the rapidly changing wind speeds. However, the presence of reverse flow could only be reproduced with the use of a building-resolving computational fluid dynamics model. This paper aims at providing a reference for airports to consider the feasibility of performing high-resolution numerical simulations of rapidly evolving airflow to alert the pilots in advance for airports in complex terrains and the setup of buildings.