The ASAPS Weather Observing System for Remotely Piloted Aircraft

Under contract with the United States Air Force, PEMDAS^¨ Technologies and Innovations designed, developed and tested the Atmospheric Sensing and Prediction System (ASAPS^¨) sensor for use on Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs). Conceived to provide resource protection for Air Force MQ-1 and MQ-9 Predator and Reaper RPAs, ASAPS provides in-situ airborne environmental measurements of key parameters and then streams those data to the ground control station in real-time. The ASAPS^¨ display software then presents the information in real time to the RPA operator and simultaneously pushes the in-situ measurements to a PEMDAS data assimilation and nowcasting system in a cloud server environment for additional processing and assimilation into a short-range forecast model. PEMDAS performed incremental testing of ASAPS by first integrating the sensor system on the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven aircraft. Under a separate contract with the United States Navy, PEMDAS further developed the ASAPS^¨ sensing system to fly onboard the Boeing Insitu ScanEagle aircraft. This presentation will present results of ASAPS^¨ testing and use with both the Raven and ScanEagle RPAs. ASAPS^¨ sensor data is evaluated for accuracy and the utility of an UAV/RPA weather observing platform is examined. Additionally, we evaluate the utility of the UAV/RPA weather observing system to generate Decision Support Tools for the platform operator.