Sensing the Atmosphere Across SCALES Using a Coordinated Mixed Network of UAS

The Small-UAS Coordination for Atmospheric Low-Level Environmental Sampling (SCALES) project is the 2024 flight week organized in coordination with the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA) annual meeting–a collaborative exercise bringing experts from around the world on uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) intended for atmospheric science applications. While a single, well defined funded program did not exist to build SCALES, the community joined to identify high-priority and realizable targets for success leading to three sub-objectives under the broader SCALES umbrella. First, MicroSCALES included deployment of systems directly in and around the Tulsa, OK urban region, enabling urban heat island sampling and targeted sampling for validation of high fidelity large eddy simulations of urban-induced turbulence. Second, MesoSCALES implemented coordinated distributed profiling across the northeastern quadrant of Oklahoma (e.g., a 3D-mesonet). Third, SCALES built in opportunities to demonstrate technical capabilities and recent advancements.

In all parts of the project, SCALES teams worked together to provide coordinated observations across spatial and temporal scales with standardized data formats. These follow the WMO standardization model and directly support the WMO UAS Demonstration Campaign in addition to providing a dataset that can meet the wide swath of research interests in the ISARRA community. This is a major step toward understanding the observation and data distribution systems that will be required for rapid and flexible weather reporting and prediction to support route planning and efficient utilization in complex low-altitude airspace. Tulsa-region deployments allowed teams to collaborate directly with stakeholders in Urban Air Mobility and enabled demonstration of today’s airspace deconfliction tools that could support safe beyond visual line of sight UAS operations. SCALES provided an opportunity for a multi-national group of operators to collect scientifically relevant data sets while demonstrating today’s capability and tomorrow’s promise for advanced air mobility concepts, integration of the national airspace, and the future of complex and variable aerospace operations in the lower atmosphere.