Atmospheric turbulence model for direct fire ballistics

Modern system accuracy studies require high fidelity representations of environmental phenomena in order to accurately predict the down range performance of a gun system. One component of the atmosphere that has not been studied in great detail within the ballistic domain is turbulence. The current portrayal of wind leveraged by system analysis efforts ignores this element of atmospheric motion completely and thus its effects on down range dispersion have not been quantified. As a first step in addressing this deficiency, this study develops a methodology for generating synthetic turbulent wind signals along the flight path of a projectile. This goal is accomplished by integrating the work of several authors, developing techniques to fill knowledge gaps, and tailoring the solution to the direct fire domain. The significant contributions of the presented effort include mean flow direction agnostic spectral functions, provisions to account for the non-homogeneity of turbulence parameters along a trajectory, and a higher fidelity signal generation method than was used in previous work. The new information is applied to a sample engagement scenario in order to demonstrate the realization of the given techniques within the small caliber direct fire domain.