22 In conversation | Dr Bryan Cole not at the high level of precision this kind of monitoring requires,” Dr Cole explains. He compares the process with that of drilling ice cores from glaciers, which preserve a record of the atmosphere’s composition stretching back thousands of years. “We can’t freeze and preserve the gases themselves, but we have very high quality measurements. The instrument the lab uses detects molecules at a sensitivity of the order of parts per trillion, or one out of every 1012 molecules in the sample.” Dr Cole says there is interest in expanding the Horus system to more sites in the US, from other countries and at sea where such observations are particularly scarce, potentially even forming a global network. “That would be very powerful in building our understanding of the composition of the atmosphere and its change over time,” he says. Another key atmospheric region for getting more and better information to improve forecasting is the planetary boundary layer, which extends from the surface up to an altitude of between 3000 and 10,000 ft, Dr Cole says. This is where most of our weather is, and it is the subject of the 2-hourly forecasts on which aviation relies, and which in turn rely on aviation. He explains, “In NOAA we have a partnership with commercial airlines to put weather sensors on their aircraft, because as they take off and land, they fly through that boundary layer. But they are limited in time and place. Where there are big, active airports we get a lot of observations; in other places we get fewer.” To address this, NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory is running the Progressive Research and Optimization of a Durable and Independent Generation of UAS (Prodigee-UAS) project with UxSTRO support. The idea is to develop a family of robust VTOL UASs that can be integrated with existing weather monitoring networks such as mesonets – US mesonets constitute a distributed, land-based weather observation system of sensor arrays in a regular pattern. “Incorporating UASs into that is a way to turn a two-dimensional monitoring into a 3D system.” The UxSTRO is already supporting several projects seeking to integrate UASs into existing monitoring systems. Prodigee is focused on the CopterSonde, a 2.36 kg quadcopter developed at the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Autonomous Sensing and Sampling in partnership with NOAA, which the team is looking to integrate into the Oklahoma mesonet. Another is an Oklahoma State University (a separate institution) collaboration with NOAA’s National Weather Service Tulsa Weather Forecast Office to integrate data collected by a Meteomatics Meteodrone into the office’s 6-hourly regional forecasts. December/January 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The US National Hurricane Center makes use of data provided by UASs, buoyancy-driven gliders and sailing USVs to improve its safety-critical hurricane forecasting (Courtesy of NOAA) The Saildrone 1045, a USV designed to survive operating in hurricanes, measured 109.83 knots (126.4 mph) as it passed through the eye wall of Category 4 Hurricane Sam in 2021 (Courtesy of Saildrone)
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