September 2019 - Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office

NOAA Provides Forecasts for World’s Largest Balloon Festival using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is an annual hot air balloon festival that takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, over the course of nine days in early October. The event attracts over 500 hot air balloons and over 800,000 attendees each year, making it the largest balloon festival in the world. The 2019 Fiesta is scheduled from October 5-13. During this time, the NOAA Air Resources Lab, UAS Program Office, National Weather Service, and Aircraft Operations Center UAS Section are partnering to provide forecasts for the balloon pilots using a small UAS.

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Drone Training for NOAA Shipboard Operation

UAS News / Ken Vierra

The National Geodetic Survey Remote Sensing Division and Office of Coast survey, recently trained seven NOAA ship officers and Navigation Response Team members on drone operations at the NOAA Marine Operations Center in Newport, OR. The successful two-day training included classroom instruction and hands-on flights focused on vessel-based research and mapping missions.

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Using Drones to Help Improve Weather Forecasts

UAS News / Ken Vierra

Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS), commonly referred to as drones, are becoming widely used for many different applications. One of these applications is to make measurements of the lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere in what scientists refer to as the boundary layer. Scientists are now using drones to gather critical information on how temperature, moisture, and wind evolve within the boundary layer under different weather conditions. Doing this helps scientists to better understand the atmosphere, ultimately leading to improvements in weather forecast models used by NOAA’s National Weather Service.

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Bathymetric Mapping and Orthoimage Generation using sUAS and SfM, An Approach for Conducting Nearshore Coastal Mapping

UAS News / Ken Vierra

The use of commercially available unmanned vehicles have become increasingly common in coastal areas. This work was funded by NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office (UASPO) through its federal funding opportunity. Our research was designed to support NOAA OCS’s nautical charting needs in shallow (<10 m) waters. NOAA OCS is developing procedures to operate sUAS from hydrographic vessels. The methods described here will be companion to these operational procedures, and together will help move this technological approach from research towards operations at NOAA. In addition working to meet NOAA OCS’s needs, there has been substantial interest in sUAS applications beyond nautical charting from other NOAA offices, federal agencies, state agencies and non-governmental organizations. This interest has ranged widely from mapping and monitoring coastal habitats to surveying marine animals to observing human activities in coastal environments. Efforts are currently underway to build on the research described here, and continue to design and test new applications for commercially available unmanned vehicles at NOAA NCCOS.

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