Taking into Account the Ground Effect on Aircraft Wake Vortices When Estimating Their Circulation from Lidar Measurements

An algorithm developed earlier for estimating the circulation of aircraft wake vortices from measurements by a Stream Line pulsed coherent Doppler lidar has been improved by using the model of a pair of aircraft vortices in the algorithm. The model takes into account the ground effect on the spatial dynamics and evolution of the vortices. In a numerical experiment, it has been shown that the improved algorithm allows one to obtain the result with a high accuracy whereas the approach used earlier overestimates the lidar measured vortex circulation approximately by 10%.