Article ID: 2019-023
Aircrafts making landing and takeoff at Narita International Airport (Narita Airport) in Japan report frequently low-level wind shear (LLWS), a local variation of wind vector, with turbulence when the prevailing wind is southwesterly, which is crosswind to the runway direction. On 20 June 2012, an arrival aircraft at Narita Airport encountered a LLWS, which consisted of a sudden change of the wind vector from head wind component of 5 knots (2.6 m s-1) to tail wind component of 10 knots (5.1 m s-1), just before the touchdown and made a hard landing. None of cumulonimbus clouds, a front or a wind shear line was observed around the airport during her approaching and landing. Analyses of the data measured by the landing aircraft and the observations by the Doppler lidar at the airport revealed that the LLWS was caused by horizontal roll vortices, which developed in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) over the Shimofusa Tableland around the airport. The horizontal roll vortices had their axes nearly parallel to the mean wind direction, and their horizontal and vertical scales were approximately 800 m and 500 m, respectively. The present study demonstrated that existence of the horizontal roll vortices causing LLWS can be effectively detected by a single-Doppler lidar which utilizes backscattering from aerosols.
Although the LLWS associated with the horizontal roll vortices has smaller magnitude than those caused by a microburst, a gust front and a front, a landing aircraft just before touchdown encounters the horizontal roll vortices with much higher probability than the other phenomena mentioned here since the horizontal roll vortices occurs at a horizontal spacing of approximately 800 m over a wide area during daytime of a clear day.
