Design and Operation of Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Payload for Collecting Meteorological Data

As the popularity of small unmanned aerial vehicles soars and rules and regulations for operation of small unmanned aircraft systems in commercial airspace is becoming more concrete, applications of UAS technology for collection of metalogical data are becoming more accepted means of data collection. Applications of this technology range from replacing balloons to collect weather sounding data to using a UAS to collect meteorological data in places that have dangerous dynamic movement, such as hurricanes or tornadoes. The focus of this paper is to describe the design and operation of a meteorological UAV payload which contains numerous sensors that are intended to collect basic meteorological information while specifically measuring the refractive index structure coefficient, Cn^2.

There are many considerations for the design and operation of a multirotor UAV payload for collecting meteorological data with the first being the use case for using a UAV instead of a tower or balloon. Advantages of using a UAV for precision location of a meteorological sensor suite are a clear advantage over balloons or towers but also come with some disadvantages in endurance or altitude restrictions. The second consideration is to evaluate the desired sensors which makeup the UAV payload for practicality of use in the environment. In some cases, sensor systems can be ruggedized and mass reduced to fit within the UAV Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) budget and in other cases more in-depth engineering is required. For mast mount systems a close look at natural frequencies and vibration modes of the UAS and structure are required to prevent the entire platform from vibrating apart. The third consideration is the design and execution of a reliable, light weight, low cost data acquisition system that is flexible enough to remain mission agnostic but powerful enough to accommodate a broad range of sensors. Such a data acquisition system should also take into consideration the storage of data, the output of required telemetry, and feedback to the UAS operator for health and status of the payload. The consideration of operations of the UAS and payload in combination can not be overstated. Experience gained during lengthy field operations has provide rules of thumb that were iteratively rolled into payload design. Finally, the consideration of how and when data reduction occurs for a given flight test or mission can determine the success or failure of an entire program. The implementation of tools that allow quick look data quality checks ensure that the data collected from the meteorological payload is of the quality expected from the experiment. There is nothing worse than collecting data for a week to find out during data reduction that there was an obvious problem with the sensor suite.

The result of lessons learned during multiple UAV payload builds and operations has yielded these valuable lessons learned that are considered critical to the successful integration and data collection of a meteorological payload on UAV systems.