NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory Drone-based Meteorological Data Obtained as part the WMO UAS Demonstration Campaign 2024

As part of the WMO’s 2024 UAS (Uncrewed Aircraft System) Demonstration Campaign (DC), multiple UAS flight teams from a variety of institutions will deploy small UAS (sUAS) vehicles coincident with the Oklahoma Mesonet stations in early September. In general, teams will obtain meteorological profiling data from at least 10 sites to test and demonstrate the utility of using sUAS measurements to: (1) assess the feasibility of obtaining and delivering continuous daily measurements; (2) evaluate and characterize the data quality through intercomparison flights; (3) distribute timely data in WMO format to improve data assimilation, model verification, etc. Specifically, in this presentation, we will focus on activities and results using the NOAA PSL Meteodrone. The Meteodrone obtains profiles of pressure, temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, and other derived values. We will present system characterization measurements and atmospheric profile observations obtained during the WMO UAS-DC.