Originally Posted by
The Ancient Geek
Regarding the inadequacies of weather radar in detecting many hazardous conditions there has been a lot of promising recent research using LIDAR.
Meteorologists are very pleased with the ability to better detect convective conditions but this is cutting edge stuff so likely to be many years away from routine use in aviation.
Maybe this will replace our current weather radars in the future. OTOH having a scanning laser on the nose of every airliner may prove to be too hazardous.
There is a problem that LIDAR does not work in heavy rain as the laser signal is too attenuated while the radar signal will work in all but the heaviest rain but is not good at identifying clear air turbulence. The answer in research was that both should be set up together.
Real issue is that turbulence may be rain wrapped or be sitting just the other side of a curtain of rain waiting for you to fly into it. This is where the human interpretation of the storm structure is needed. Honest research meteorologists will admit that this is not a simple problem every storm is different. This is why the rather less than useful advice is to avoid flying close to Cb. In all areas of the tropics and sub-tropics this would stop flying a large proportion of the time. However, it does lend support to the idea of a 'business trajectory' being used rather than fixed routes based on canned plans.