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TDWR
Airports across the country are now equipped with Raytheon Terminal Doppler Weather Radars (TDWRs). These radars scan the skies in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions in order to develop a 3D "picture" of the weather in the area. Their doppler capability allows them to determine not only reflectivity (e.g. rainfall rate) but also radial velocity (i.e. the component of the wind's direction and speed which is aligned with the radar beam. Sophisticated algorithms process the raw radar data, searching for weather that would be hazardous to aircraft with particular emphasis on identifying low-level wind shear.

Source Code Systems participated in the development, deployment, and operation of the prototype TDWR radars by M.I.T's Lincoln Laboratory. The work focused on three major areas:

1) Development of a sophisticated, programmable, multi-tasking, control/display subsystem which could be (and was) used for everything from scientific studies of weather phenomena to multiple, geographically distributed, real-time displays of weather products and takeoff/landing hazards for airport control tower personnel, to live demonstrations and trade shows, to medical imaging studies.  The subsystem incorporated dozens of unique features including a capability for displays to communicate with each other even when located on different machines or in different states and a programming language incorporating the syntax, flexibility, and power of the UNIX C-shell (csh).

2) Development of servo-control algorithms to optimize the scanning pattern of a fast-moving 30 foot radar dish.

3) Development of powerful and flexible tools for the collection, dissemination, archiving of real-time data streams ranging from tens of characters per minute to   hundreds of thousands of bytes per second.

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