The Role of sUAS for Poststorm Damage Assessment in the National Weather Service: Past Successes, Current Initiatives, and Future Plans of the Eastern Region Drone Team

In the hours and days following significant severe weather, staff from local National Weather Service (NWS) offices arrive on-site to conduct post storm damage assessment surveys. The primary objective of a survey is to determine the exact time and location of an event, the magnitude of an event, and whether any wind damage was caused by a tornado or straight line winds. The process is rather detailed and time consuming as debris is thoroughly inspected and compared to a catalog of known damage indicators. Of equal importance are patterns detected in a debris field as they are often critical to detecting rotational signatures indicative of a tornado. These patterns are more easily observed from the air and the National Weather Service has historically partnered with agencies such as the Civil Air Patrol and local members of the emergency management community to obtain flight time in small aircraft. Technological advances in the early part of the 21^st century gave rise to a new breed of aircraft called small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAS), colloquially referred to as drones, which made obtaining and using small scale aerial imaging platforms a viable option for inspecting storm damage. In 2014, WFO Blacksburg, Virginia and WFO Charleston, South Carolina formed the Eastern Region Drone Team (ERDT) to investigate the possibility of formally integrating sUAS into post storm damage assessment surveys.

This presentation will discuss the results of past successful efforts by ERDT to integrate drones into the post storm damage assessment process, current testing initiatives for independent sUAS flights by local NWS offices, and future plans to develop artificial intelligence for autonomous interrogation of aerial storm damage imagery.