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A lot is missing from our technical knowledge about the lower bounds of the local atmosphere and airspace.
Current weather radar used by the National Weather Service in Wakefield doesn’t get very close to the ground, according to Bill Moore, a Hampton University assistant professor with the Center for Atmospheric Sciences.
“There’s a gap in which we really don’t have particularly good information on what the atmosphere is doing,” he recently told the Hampton City Council. “We’re looking to see how we can rectify that.”
Moore is involved with a new project that is using Hampton as a testbed for getting much more detailed weather data that can better serve the growing drone industry.
A Northern Virginia-based company called TruWeather Solutions is leading the project, using a $750,000 research grant from NASA.
The company will put up about 35 sensors around downtown, including at Mill Point Park, the Hampton History Museum and the Virginia Air and Space Center.
The equipment gathers data on wind in particular, and uses a combination of technologies including radiowaves and laser-based lidar.
The sensors then communicate with a nearby indoor base station connected to Wi-Fi, according to TruWeather.
A photo showing an example of one of the sensors that will go up around the city. The location shown is no longer one of the planned sites.
The project will also look at aspects like how levels of salt in the air affect wear and tear on drone vehicles.
The eventual goal is to allow drone systems to move beyond traditional parameters – something commercial operators are eager to do.
Current Federal Aviation Administration regulations mandate that drones can only be flown in the user’s visual line of sight.
Lena Little, regional partnerships lead at NASA Langley Research Center, said the federal agency thinks it’s important to know more about weather conditions at a lower altitude as drones become more common.
“We’re at a point now in drone use that we need to figure out how to integrate them safely into the airspace amongst all kinds of other air traffic and air traffic of the future that doesn’t exist yet,” Little said. “How do we make sure people are safe on the ground and in the air?”
Anything flying in the national airspace needs “very, very accurate weather information,” she said, and that can always be better.
Weather data of the future “needs to be autonomous and reliable and sensing at all times so that the pilot and the vehicle is going to get real time information about the weather and be able to make autonomous decisions about what to do in different scenarios,” Little said.
Eventually, there may not even be a human pilot – making that data even more critical.
A drone carrying a package, for example, would need to use real-time weather information to decide a route to a particular neighborhood.
Officials chose Hampton over Dallas, Syracuse and other cities for the project, called “Urban Weather Sensing Infrastructure Testbed.”
Moore, with Hampton University, told council members that the city’s a good real-life laboratory because of its mix of water and land, complicated airspace tied to military installations and constant weather variations.
“If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” he said. “We’re very excited to be at the forefront of it.”
TruWeather’s research contract lasts through May 2024.
