Description:

This Town Hall Panel will discuss some demonstrated and emerging achievements of UAVs/UsXs/Drones in normal and extreme, life-property threatening and damage assessment of Wx, Water, and Climate change events and forecasts. This Town Hall will convene a Panel of some subject-matter-experts and leaders from government, academia, and commercial sectors to address these capabilities. But more importantly, the Panel will address the premise that UAVs/UsXs/Drones are capable and ready to be incorporated in a plan for a multi-platform, multi-sensor, coordinated and integrated, more comprehensive Earth environmental observation system. The Panel will address some of the UAVs/UsXs/Drones gap-filling and integrating capabilities¹ – such as high spatial resolution, observations for otherwise inaccessible regions, and temporal loitering – that have been demonstrated in events and forecasts of hurricanes, floods, atmospheric observations, gap-filling over US and arctic regions, harmful algal blooms, marine aerosols and atmospheric fluxes, land and sea wildlife and habitats and ecosystems, climate change effects, and even air sampling for health assessment. This Discussion will include some major capabilities and contributions of the present and future NASA UAV/UAS, NOAA UAS/UsX, and Commercial UAV/UAS Observations and Systems. Support for this Town Hall is provided by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Integrated Systems Solutions, Inc. and Science and Technology Corporation.¹NOAA UAS Program Overview, April 2019 and Statements of NOAA’s UxSRTO [Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office]