Data generated during the 2018 LAPSE-RATE campaign: an introduction and overview

Earth system science data · 2020 · 38 citations

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Meteorology

Abstract. Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) offer innovative capabilities for providing new perspectives on the atmosphere, and therefore atmospheric scientists are rapidly expanding their use, particularly for studying the planetary boundary layer. In support of this expansion, from 14 to 20 July 2018 the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA) hosted a community flight week, dubbed the Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at Elevation – a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE; de Boer et al., 2020a). This field campaign spanned a 1-week deployment to Colorado's San Luis Valley, involving over 100 students, scientists, engineers, pilots, and outreach coordinators. These groups conducted intensive field operations using unmanned aircraft and ground-based assets to develop comprehensive datasets spanning a variety of scientific objectives, including a total of nearly 1300 research flights totaling over 250 flight hours. This article introduces this campaign and lays the groundwork for a special issue on the LAPSE-RATE project. The remainder of the special issue provides detailed overviews of the datasets collected and the platforms used to collect them. All of the datasets covered by this special issue have been uploaded to a LAPSE-RATE community set up at the Zenodo data archive (https://zenodo.org/communities/lapse-rate/, last access: 3 December 2020).

Field observation of tornadic supercells by multiple autonomous fixed‐wing unmanned aircraft

Journal of Field Robotics · 2020 · 49 citations

• Computer Science
• Aerospace engineering
• Computer Science

Abstract This paper presents the results of the design and field deployment of multiple autonomous fixed‐wing unmanned aircraft into supercell thunderstorms. As part of a field campaign in Spring 2019, up to three fixed‐wing unmanned aircraft were deployed simultaneously into different regions of supercell thunderstorms, To learn more about the atmospheric conditions that lead to the formation of tornadoes. Successful field deployment is attributed to (a) a nomadic concept of operations that allows the unmanned aircraft system team and science team to work seamlessly together while satisfying all aviation regulations and (b) the ruggedized RAAVEN unmanned aircraft system with modular features that favor rapid, ease‐of‐use over the brute strength of previous designs. The concept of operations and the unmanned aircraft system are described along with results from a 4 day window where four storms were sampled: two of these storms were tornadic (formed tornadoes before, during, or after being sampled) and two were not. These results validate the feasibility of nomadic operation of multiple unmanned aircraft simultaneously in severe weather conditions. Further, the successful field deployments demonstrate the importance of the modular unmanned aircraft design.