An Integrated Wind and Thermodynamic Profiling Instrumentation and Decision Support System: Concepts for the UAV Superhighways

The number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for government and commercial purposes is expected to continue to rise significantly in the US over the next several years with applications in homeland security, agriculture, ecommerce, law enforcement, and mapping among others. Various applications have the necessity that UAVs operate at differing altitudes, in turn requiring differing meteorological observational needs and decision support.

Presented herein is a wind and thermodynamic profiling system that allows for strategic placement of lidars, sodars, radiometers, and wind profilers along UAV flight paths to provide high-resolution measurements of the boundary layer through the depth of the troposphere depending on the application. These measurements are integrated to provide information on atmospheric stability, wind shear, low-level jets, fog, inversions, icing conditions, and flight level winds. Data from these instrumentation sets can be used for customized decision support systems as well as provided to other government and commercial agencies that benefit from such instrumentation networks. These data can also be used for initialization and assimilation within Numerical Weather Prediction models.

This presentation will discuss the instrumentation sets, decision support applications, and data distribution.