An efficient echo data dynamic scanning and displaying method for airborne weather radar

Efficient echo data scanning and displaying is at the core of control and display unit (CDU) of airborne weather radar. CDU can visually reflect weather status and provide intelligent control functions. In this paper, authors propose a dynamic scanning and displaying method for CDU virtual realization, which can effectively fulfill weather radar echo data real-time scanning and displaying based on virtual instrument technology. To achieve dynamic and real-time data scanning and displaying, our method designs a hierarchical displaying sector and develops a more efficient, flexible serial port communication scheme based on multi-thread technique, and a cyclic bit-shift is also proposed for real-time serial weather data disposal, which reduces workload and runtime. Furthermore, geometric modeling and functional modeling are used in our design and so that developed CDU provides a synthetic human-machine interface. At last, the core functions, precipitation and windshear detection are implemented and tested under simulation conditions. The test results indicate that the developed CDU in which our proposed method is embedded performs favorable interactivity, stability under real-time data exchange and displaying. The CDU design and implementation strictly follow practical aeronautical characteristic, thus it is also transplantable to other radar CDU applications.