Observational data from uncrewed systems over Southern Great Plains

Abstract

Abstract. Uncrewed Systems (UxS), including uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and tethered balloon/kite systems (TBS), are significantly expanding observational capabilities in atmospheric science. Rapid adaptation of these platforms and the advancement of miniaturized instruments have resulted in an expanding number of datasets captured under various environmental conditions by the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility. In 2021, observational data collected using ARM UxS platforms, including seven TigerShark UAS flights and 133 tethered balloon system (TBS) flights, were archived by the ARM Data Center (https://adc.arm.gov/discovery/#/, last access: 11 February 2022) and made publicly available at no cost for all registered users (https://doi.org/10.5439/1846798) (Mei and Dexheimer, 2022). These data streams provide new perspectives on spatial variability of atmospheric and surface parameters, helping to address critical science questions in Earth system science research. This paper describes the DOE UAS/TBS datasets, including information on the acquisition, collection, and quality control processes, and highlights the potential scientific contributions using UAS and TBS platforms.

Two new multirotor UAVs for glaciogenic cloud seeding and aerosol measurements within the CLOUDLAB project

“…The POPS is a lightweight (550 g) optical particle counter measuring particle number and particle size distribution in the range of 115 nm -3.37 µm at a 1-second time resolution. POPS was designed to be used on mobile platforms and has already been deployed with success on radiosonde balloons (Yu et al, 2017(Yu et al, , 2019Kloss et al, 2020), tethered balloons (de Boer et al, 2018;Creamean et al, 2021;Pilz et al, 2022;Mei et al, 2022;Walter et al, 2023;Lata et al, 2023), fixed-wing UAVs (Telg et al, 2017;Kezoudi et al, 2021;Mei et al, 2022;DeFelice et al, 2023), and other multirotor UAVs (Liu et al, 2021;Brus et al, 2021).…”

“…The POPS has been extensively described, characterized, and validated in previous studies (Gao et al, 2016;Mei et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2021;Mei et al, 2022;Kasparoglu et al, 2022;Pilz et al, 2022;Mynard et al, 2023). Here, we performed selected tests in the laboratory to ensure that POPS UAV and POPS TBS count and size particles correctly, detailed in Appendix A.…”

“…Other studies have suggested setting limits of total concentration to filter out bad data. Mei et al (2022) flagged data with concentrations above 4000 particles cm −3 , while Mynard et al (2023) flagged data with concentrations above 7000 particles cm −3 . However, the concentration measurement itself is biased.…”

High-Resolution Image Products Acquired from Mid-Sized Uncrewed Aerial Systems for Land–Atmosphere Studies

“…While the ArcticShark was undergoing upgrades and modifications in 2021, the AAF staff collaborated with the Mississippi State University (MSU) Raspet Flight Research Laboratory (RFRL) to fly the ArcticShark scientific payload on an RFRL TS-B3-XP TigerShark. A description of all the datasets obtained from the AAF payload can be found here [32]. A comparison between the TigerShark XP and ArcticShark is shown in Table 1.…”

“…We believe that this is due to the thickness of the window on the thermal imager lens. Notably, Mei et al found that the Apogee IRT surface temperature readings varied with altitude, likely resulting from changing internal temperature [32]. The spectral profile was collected at different altitudes to test for the effects of atmospheric scattering.…”