Storm-Chasing Drones

Office of Research Author

06/20/2018 Added

28 Plays

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Adam Houston brings unmanned aerial vehicles and atmospheric science together to better predict thunderstorms.

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[00:00:00.370]Understanding where and when thunderstorms form
[00:00:02.490]is important for the general public.
[00:00:04.800]When they become severe, we need to know
[00:00:06.740]where they're gonna form.
[00:00:07.740]We need to eventually understand something more about
[00:00:10.209]why they become severe, but the first step is
[00:00:12.790]understanding why and when they form.
[00:00:15.360]In general, my research involves the use of
[00:00:17.870]unmanned aircraft to understand thunderstorms.
[00:00:21.100]We use two types of drones for our research.
[00:00:23.220]A fixed wing drone that looks like a regular aircraft,
[00:00:26.740]except much smaller, and of course, with no person on it,
[00:00:29.720]and rotary wing, or multi-rotor aircraft.
[00:00:32.040]These are the drones with multiple helicopter-like
[00:00:35.120]rotors on it that go up and down.
[00:00:37.370]The drones are outfitted with fairly simple instruments.
[00:00:40.860]There's a pressure temperature moisture sensor on it.
[00:00:44.670]There's also a wind sensor, so we measure the wind velocity
[00:00:48.480]in three dimensions, so not only the horizontal wind,
[00:00:51.990]but also the vertical, updrafts and downdrafts
[00:00:54.210]that the aircraft might encounter.
[00:00:56.490]The ground based vehicles that we use as part of
[00:00:59.360]the unmanned aircraft system are what we call
[00:01:02.040]mobile mezzanents.
[00:01:03.360]The reason is complements unmanned aircraft
[00:01:05.210]because ideally what you want to get it a stacked tower.
[00:01:08.070]You want to get observations near the ground
[00:01:09.780]as well as above the ground.
[00:01:12.010]This July we'll be conducting a field experiment
[00:01:15.350]in southern Colorado and the San Luis Valley.
[00:01:18.180]It's a great laboratory for examining
[00:01:21.690]a variety of phenomena, but one of the things we're focusing
[00:01:24.590]on is thunderstorm initiation.
[00:01:26.590]It's an escort project at NSF, so involves Oklahoma
[00:01:31.140]State University, University of Kentucky, University
[00:01:33.650]of Oklahoma, and of course, University of Nebraska.
[00:01:36.090]University of Nebraska, we have multiple investigators
[00:01:39.140]involved, and they all revolve around this core objective,
[00:01:44.200]which is to bring atmospheric science and unmanned aircraft
[00:01:47.660]together to advance understanding, but in the end,
[00:01:51.470]advance predictability, so the plan is to go out
[00:01:54.590]with 30 unmanned aircraft and sample the heck out of it,
[00:01:59.010]and hopefully, in the process, we've designed
[00:02:01.220]the experiment correctly, get some data we can use
[00:02:03.750]to understand how the atmosphere interacts with the land
[00:02:07.850]to support formation of thunderstorms.
[00:02:09.560](light music)

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Storm-Chasing Drones

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