Microscale Winds and Turbulence Predictions for Advanced Air Mobility Operations Support

Throughout a series of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) efforts, Aeris has developed a common operating picture (COP) for Urban Air Mobility / Advanced Air Mobility (UAM/AAM) aircraft operations that currently supports both web-based and mobile deployments. This technology is known as the Small Air Traffic Management System (SATMS). SATMS allows stakeholders to view/monitor live air traffic within user defined Areas Of Interest (AOIs), communicate with other operators, and view 3d party weather information, microscale atmospheric simulations and other predictive information products. Recently, atmospheric large eddy simulation (LES) models have proven to be useful tools for the planning and design of UAM/AAM operational corridors in urban environments. These models resolve and predict low-level turbulence induced by the interaction of large-scale meteorology with surface obstacles, terrain and varying landuse that influence the weather conditions in which UAM/AAM operations are performed.

A version of the JOULES model driven by time varying operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, referred to as JOULES-NWP has recently been implemented over Winston-Salem, NC. and incorporated into SATAMS to provide operators with weather information products within a COP. Furthermore, because the JOULES model is a native graphics processing unit (GPU) code, Aeris has been able to produce these weather products at faster-than-real-time to provide microscale weather forecasting capabilities within the AOIs. Over the past several months SATMS along with the JOULES-NWP system has been undergoing testing and evaluation in the Winston Salem, NC AOI. In this presentation we will describe the SATMS system and the Joint Outdoor-indoor Urban Large Eddy Simulation (JOULES-NWP) modeling used for simulating and predicting microscale weather conditions. This presentation will also provide a summary of our initial experience with deploying a microscale weather prediction system and thoughts regarding needs and challenges for producing microscale weather information and forecast products for AAM.