The Aerosonde, a robotic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is an observational platform that can provide meteorological information over oceans and remote areas, and from within severe weather events. The Aerosonde can provide high resolution meteorological observations, on both temporal and spatial scales, which is often unavailable to researchers and forecasters through more commonly used remote sensing techniques.

Over past years, Aerosonde missions have been undertaken in varying environmental conditions. These include missions in the polar regions,mid-latitudes and the tropics. More specifically, missions have been undertaken to investigate the tropical atmosphere and tropical cyclones off the West Australian coastline (e.g. the outer circulation of TC Tiffany in January 1998), out of Guam, Japan and Taiwan researching convective weather and typhoons (e.g. outer circulation of Typhoon Haiyan in October 2001), and missions as part of the fourth Convection And Moisture Experiment (CAMEX-4) off the East Coast of the United States in August-September 2001, amongst others. Observations taken during some of these Aerosonde missions in the tropics, and some modelled tropical cyclone results using these Aerosonde data, will be analysed and presented in this paper.