In an effort to determine whether use of a UAS APH-22 hexacopter would cause disturbance to endangered Hawaiian monk seals or seabirds, the team at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center’s Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program embarked on an exploratory study in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI).
With funding provided by the NOAA UAS Program Office in OAR through the “SHOUT4Rivers” project, Dr. Robert Moorhead (Director of NOAA’s Northern Gulf Institute, NGI, and principal investigator) and his team have been working for the past couple of years to develop and test plans to deploy large UAS to collect aerial imagery of flood-impacted regions in response to needs expressed by multiple NWS River Forecast Centers (RFCs).
NGI Publishes Research on Use of UAS to Identify and Analyze Flood Impacts Read More »
During 2015 and 2016, NOAA conducted three field campaigns using the NASA Global Hawk autonomous aircraft outfitted with GPS dropwindsondes and remote sensors. The Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) project evaluated the potential ability of this high-altitude aircraft to collect novel observations to improve forecasts of high-impact weather events including hurricanes. The experiment also examined the effectiveness of employing new technology of this type. A new article to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, led by ESRL PSD with multiple NOAA and joint institute co-authors, provides a an overview of SHOUT and summarize the various missions flown over the two-year campaign, the observations collected and their application, and the results of a diverse set of studies evaluating the impact of the data on multiple operational forecast systems.
On February 17, 2020, flight tests were conducted by L3Harris on the M/V Richard L. Becker off Fort Lauderdale, FL to demonstrate autonomous takeoff and recovery from a moving vessel at-sea. L3Harris completed all objectives and demonstrated fully autonomous flight using Hybrid Quadrotor (HQ) technology from a moving ship with limited deck space. The FVR-55 took off from the ship vertically, switched to fixed wing flight, and returned and landed vertically on the ship autonomously (no external pilot control inputs required).
Supported with UAS Program Office funding, a team from the University of Colorado Boulder will deploy the RAAVEN sUAS from Barbados between 19 January and 17 February 2020. Launch and retrieval will occur from the shore at a field and the adjacent beach in Morgan Lewis, Barbados. RAAVEN miniFlux measurements can directly contribute to advancing our scientific understanding relevant to NOAA forecasting efforts across weather and climate scales. Specifically, information on the vertical distribution of
