Using unmanned aircraft as sensing platforms

When the Department of Defense commences an operation, quite often the amount of observation data available for a forecast model is miniscule. It can be impractical or not cost effective to insert devices to provide needed observations. The Naval Research Laboratory has been working to harvest aircraft type observations from Unmanned Aeronautical Systems (UAS). Work with the Predator and Shadow UAS will be discussed, including the software used to extract the observations and process them into FM42 AMDAR format, the typical errors and biases of the observations, the pre-processor used to quality-control and average the observations before providing them to the data assimilation system, and results from using these observations in the U.S. Navy's data assimilation and modeling systems.