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(IVAR) - Final Report - Strategic Environmental Research and ...

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The original BirdRad system was designed to be an inexpensive, mobile avian radar. It included<br />

low-cost commercial off-the-shelf COTS marine radar (Furuno 2155BB) outfitted with a<br />

parabolic dish antenna (4º beam width for better altitude resolution) <strong>and</strong> a desktop PC for<br />

displaying <strong>and</strong> capturing the radar images in graphic files. Five BirdRad systems were built by<br />

the Clemson University Radar Ornithology Lab (CUROL) <strong>and</strong> deployed at three Navy <strong>and</strong> one<br />

Marine Corps air stations, <strong>and</strong> one Air Force base.<br />

Shortly after the first BirdRad units were deployed, the NRM <strong>and</strong> BASH personnel who were the<br />

end-users of these systems - as opposed to radar engineers or ornithologists who developed this<br />

technology - began requesting enhancements to these systems. Those requested enhancements<br />

included:<br />

• Removing the excessive ground clutter that made distinguishing the targets difficult;<br />

• Tracking <strong>and</strong> recording the bird movements automatically;<br />

• Remotely controlling <strong>and</strong> scheduling the radar operation (for example, for dawn <strong>and</strong> dusk<br />

sampling); <strong>and</strong><br />

• Displaying the bird tracks on facility maps <strong>and</strong> aerial photographs in ways that would be<br />

useful to relate bird activity to known l<strong>and</strong>marks <strong>and</strong> the underlying terrain features.<br />

In 2002, the Naval Facilities Engineering Comm<strong>and</strong> (NAVFAC) tasked the Space <strong>and</strong> Naval<br />

Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, California (SSC-SD 1 ) to undertake a project to<br />

investigate whether the requested enhancements to BirdRad were technically feasible <strong>and</strong><br />

affordable. The SSC-SD team, which included its contractor, Computer Sciences Corporation<br />

(CSC), began by conducting an analysis of the requirements of NRM <strong>and</strong> BASH personnel for<br />

collecting bird activity data, with an eye to underst<strong>and</strong>ing how radar technology might assist in<br />

those efforts. Based on those analyses, researchers at SSC-SD proposed modifying the design of<br />

the BirdRad system by replacing the analog signal processor that came with the marine radar with<br />

a digital radar processor <strong>and</strong> sophisticated digital detection <strong>and</strong> tracking software – capabilities<br />

that previously could only be found in expensive military surveillance <strong>and</strong> tracking radars. The<br />

SSD-SD team concluded that recent advances in COTS computing technologies might make these<br />

capabilities affordable for avian radar systems. After a competitive procurement, CSC<br />

subcontracted with Sicom Systems Ltd. to adapt its MT-Tracker software (now included <strong>and</strong><br />

br<strong>and</strong>ed under the Accipiter® name) to track birds. The resultant enhanced BirdRad, or<br />

eBirdRad, system was first deployed in 2004.<br />

In 2005, the Federal Aviation Administration <strong>Research</strong> <strong>and</strong> Development Program (AAR 411)<br />

initiated a comprehensive effort to assess the performance of avian radars <strong>and</strong> radar support<br />

systems that had recently appeared in the marketplace from a few vendors. This effort resulted<br />

in the deployment of avian radars in 2006 <strong>and</strong> the initiation of a comprehensive performance<br />

assessment program at civil airports, with the purpose of evaluating radar technologies <strong>and</strong> the<br />

supporting data management <strong>and</strong> control systems. The University of Illinois Center of<br />

Excellence in Airport Technology (CEAT) selected the Accipiter® avian radar systems for initial<br />

deployment <strong>and</strong> assessment.<br />

The FAA’s deployment <strong>and</strong> performance assessment of the Accipiter® AR-1 <strong>and</strong> AR-2 radars at<br />

several civil airports was complementary to the ongoing SSC-SD efforts. As part of that effort,<br />

the FAA supported a joint deployment of an Accipiter® AR-1 <strong>and</strong> an eBirdRad at the Naval Air<br />

1<br />

Now known as the Space <strong>and</strong> Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific)<br />

11

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