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6 Mission-critical info for UST professionals Dec 2015/Jan 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology Platform one Researchers at the Oklahoma State University (OSU) in the US are designing a series of unmanned aircraft to monitor bad weather and improve the accuracy of data for forecasting. The $6m, four-year project will develop craft that can climb vertically and autonomously to 1000 m carrying sensors to measure temperature, humidity and pressure. It will also develop fixed-wing systems with an endurance of up to eight hours that can be deployed quickly to fly at the edges of storms to monitor conditions. Although researchers have in the past used large UAVs like the Predator to study hurricanes, the cost is prohibitive for more widespread study of atmospheric conditions. “We’ve been working on this for a couple of years now, and the goal is to keep this in the small UAV realm as we want these to be easily deployable by the scientists in the field,” said Dr Jamey Jacob, Professor of Aerospace Engineering in OSU’s College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology (CEAT), the project’s principal investigator. “We are letting the requirements drive the design but we are working on both fixed-wing and rotary craft, and hope to integrate these systems into the daily meteorological information-gathering that goes into the weather models. “We get a lot of severe weather in Oklahoma but we have only two locations with balloons that watch the weather,” he said. “But we do have an extensive network of towers that monitor the weather, and we want to extend those to 500 or 1000 m virtually with an aircraft, collect the data and come down, and that could be hourly on demand. These platforms will be some kind of rotor craft, both in-house and commercial. “The issue is not developing new systems but modifying off-the-shelf platforms,” he said. “One thing we are developing right now is to use the onboard inertial measurement unit as an accurate wind sensor based on the effort required to maintain the craft’s position. “For the severe weather applications, the real interest is what happens before that weather arrives. Most storms form by a process called convection initiation that pushes a plume of warm air into the atmosphere, so we need an endurance of six to eight hours to be able to get this basic thermodynamic data. We use in-house UAVs with sensors and dropsondes that can be dropped on demand by parachute to provide profile data from altitudes up to 2000 m.” The platforms are all composite construction using carbon composites, a Kevlar skin and fibre glass body, and the team is designing for 10 g vertical and lateral stresses and 120 mph side loading, which will handle up to 99% of expected environmental conditions. “The goal is not to fly into a tornado, where you see speeds of 300 mph, but around it,” said Jacob. “One of our plans is to have a multi-week campaign to test these technologies in the field. We have severe weather from early March to June, and we will be able to bring the various team members together to test the technology. Simply having the ability to fly multiple vehicles at the same time in the same environment hasn’t really been done.” The Talos fixed-wing UAV is designed to be deployed quickly and fly at the edges of storms Weather monitoring Storm-chasers unveiled