UAS / AAM Microscale Weather Modeling: Validation and Refinement of Derived Hazard Products and Feasibility of Hyperlocal Weather Hazard Comparisons for Full Cities or Regions

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in collaboration with state governments, other research organizations, and industry experts, continues to engage and work to define, advance, and safeguard uncrewed aviation systems (UAS) and advanced air mobility (AAM) operations. A persistent and cross-cutting challenge, as these missions and operating domains continue to expand in space and time, and mature and diversify, is identifying and mitigating impactful urban, suburban, and terrain-influenced microscale weather conditions to help ensure safe and efficient UAS / AAM operations. Research has consistently shown that hazardous conditions in urban and suburban environments can vary greatly by the time of day or larger-scale wind and environmental conditions, and are further perturbed by the built environment. Lacking sufficient weather observations and forecasts at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales, assessing operating risks will continue to be a challenge for UAS/AAM missions. Enhancements and findings from this research exploring applications of a novel, fast-time, building, land-use, and terrain-resolvable, microscale weather model have demonstrated a path forward for not only evaluating the microscale urban and suburban weather hazard conditions, but also to allow for enhanced services that enable improved planning, training, and safeguarding that reduce weather risks, for safer, more sustainable, and scalable UAS and AAM operations. MITRE’s previous efforts supporting the FAA, leveraged microscale weather model simulations for complex urban-suburban areas (Raleigh and Winston-Salem, NC), evaluating weather sensitivities and causes, resulting in translated wind and turbulence hazards, known as Shake and Sharp^TM, that are expected to assist UAS / AAM strategy, implementation prioritization, and mission planning and execution.

This paper will demonstrate the continued evolution of the microscale weather hazard products through validation and refinement of simulated wind and turbulence hazards in discrete UAS/AAM mission areas, using independent weather observations and onboard weather and performance data from UAS vehicles. Additionally, sensitivity experiments seeking to balance compute resources / times, spatial domain extent, and hyperlocal resolution requirements for UAS / AAM strategy and planning will be presented. Results here will summarize the approach and present results for optimizing modeling time / resources in balance with targeted, extended model domain coverage and 3-D spatial resolution to effectively and more hastily discern infrastructure, land-use, terrain-affected microscale weather risks to UAS / AAM missions across multiple, comparable cities and regions.

NOTICE

This work was produced for the U.S. Government under Contract 693KA8-22-C-00001 and is subject to Federal Aviation Administration Acquisition Management System Clause 3.5-13, Rights In Data-General, Alt. III and Alt. IV (Oct. 1996).

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