Use of Drones in Operational Weather Service: Benefits and Roadblocks

Traditionally, observations on ambient conditions for weather services rely on vast networks of ground-based in-situ sensors. Such information is critical as input for numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and climatological archives. Professional weather nowcasters and general public also review current weather based on the network of ground-based observations. Today weather services increasingly require information on atmospheric state in the vertical profile. Radiosounding has long been a standard method for profiling current atmospheric state two to four times per day. Additionally, lidar and radar techniques, with advanced data processing methods, provide invaluable and high temporal frequency profile observations on wind, clouds and aerosol. These techniques, however, require high financial investments which necessarily hinders development of observation networks based on these techniques.

Advances in drone and other unmanned aviation vehicle (UAV) technological development create new opportunities for atmospheric profiling. Finnish Meteorological Institute investigates applicability of drone-borne measurements for needs of operational weather service and researchers developing models, such as NWP, dispersion and climate. Our multi-year development project investigates a variety of perspectives of benefits and roadblocks of drone, and UAVs in general, operational use.

In the project, an autonomous drone system was piloted and its current applicability for frequent (two times in an hour) operational profiling purposes was investigated under different weather conditions. The autonomous drone was tested in Jokioinen, Central Finland, and Sodankylä, Northern Finland. In the north, winter is harsh and temperatures decrease down to –30 Celcius degrees. Additionally, in Finland, super-cooled liquid water containing clouds are frequently observed during winter months. Thus, the ambient conditions can create a great challenge for drone operation year around. At test sites we had reference observations from co-located radio-soudings, Doppler lidar and meteorological sensors in the mast.

The study also evaluates applicability of near-real-time data of the autonomous drone in aviation weather forecaster’s work. Future development work in the project will include, as an example, testing of measurement sensors and their optimal mounting, investigation of impact of a drone on observations, and development of a measurement system. As a result of the development project, we aim to be able for deciding how to best utilize drones for atmospheric profile measurements in operational observation perspective. The latest status of the project will be presented in the conference.