Accipiter® Avian Radar System

The problem of aircraft colliding with birds results in major economic losses and creates serious safety risks for commercial, military and general aviation worldwide. Military and commercial airports all have programs to reduce bird aircraft strike hazards (BASH) and could benefit from high-performance radar solutions to provide both real-time situational awareness of bird locations and long-term monitoring of bird activity to inform airport maintenance, development and operations decisions. Avian radars are also used for performing environmental impact studies prior to the installation of tall buildings, communications towers and wind generating systems and are gaining acceptance for post-construction monitoring to track actual environmental impact on bird populations.

Accipiter® Radar Technologies Inc. (ARTI) develops, manufactures and sells the Accipiter® family of avian surveillance radar systems designed to provide superior situational awareness of bird activity both in real-time and for long-term historical data collection. Accipiter provides a complete radar target information solution scalable from a single radar site to multi-radar, multi-user radar networks needed to provide coverage of large, active airports and wide-area bird studies. Accipiter is a "Software Definable" radar solution with a wide range of available hardware configurations which can be optimized for virtually any geography or target scenario. Accipiter's "true-Earth coordinates", server-based architecture for target data is an integrator's dream enabling easy integration with third-party "Common Operating Picture" (COP) systems with very low demands on the COP's computing and bandwidth resources.

Accipiter® avian radars achieve outstanding detection and tracking performance and provide advanced automated surveillance features at low cost by combining economical commercial off-the-shelf marine radar hardware with ARTI's sophisticated Accipiter® digital radar processor. Automated alerts minimize attention demands on radar monitoring staff and remote control eliminates the need for travel to the radar site except for hardware maintenance. Accipiter® is the price/performance leader for avian radar applications.

Accipiter® is supported by Canada's leading team of radar scientists/engineers with over 175 years of combined experience in developing advanced radar technology. This world-class team is continually advancing Accipiter's performance and capabilities and developing new products guided by customer needs. ARTI works with wildlife biologists, radar ornithologists, and airport safety personnel to ensure that features accurately meet user needs. ARTI's technical team can provide custom development, configuration and support services to adapt and optimize Accipiter® systems and networks to specific applications.

Accipiter avian radar systems are currently in use at numerous U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force airfields and at major commercial airports such as Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Chicago's O'Hare, and New York's JFK.

 Role of Near-Miss Birdstrikes  (PDF - 1,837 KB)
 Bird Strike 2007 Avian Radar: History, Present & Future  (PDF - 167 KB)
 Bird Strike 2005 Avian Radar Networks Paper  (PDF - 227 KB)
 Accipiter®AR for Natural Resources Management (NRM)  (PDF - 1,506 KB)
 Accipiter®AR for Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH)  (PDF - 1,174 KB)
 BirdStrike2006  (PDF - 725 KB)
 Where does the word Accipiter come from?

For more information, contact Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc..