“Alaska – Our Aircraft Carrier in the Arctic!”
The NOAA UAS Program briefed the 2017 Alaska UAS Interest Group Conference in Fairbanks, AK, September 12th-15th. The Alaska UAS Interest Group Meeting is the premier event for keeping up with developments in the UAS industry in Alaska and beyond. With the Arctic playing a more important role in international trade, search and rescue logistics, and natural resource extraction than ever before, the program coordinated an Arctic UAS Workshop in January 2017 in support of the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP) which was briefed including upcoming UAS mission with NOAA’s Arctic partners.
The UAS Program’s John “JC” Coffey shared the program’s strategic vision and execution from requirements capture to “transition to operations”. NOAA”s recent successes in the Alaska and Polar environments focusing on hazardous weather, maritime and Polar surveys included:
- Puma UAS deploys onboard from US Coast Guard Cutter’s (Icebreaker) Healy and Polar Star for marine monitoring, search & rescue and oil spill detection with ONR, AeroVironment.
- Development of partnership with UAF, US Navy, USCG, Conoco Philips for ScanEagle flights in the Arctic.
- NWS’ River Forecasting Center Rapid Response with UAS for Yukon River Watch since 2013.
- UAS use for satellite calibration and validation.
- The successful “Transition to Operation” of Aurora Flight Science’s Centaur for Grav-D survey.
- Other platform coordination including Global Hawk, Aerosonde, and Flexrotor.
- Upcoming UAS missions (attached brief).
Please contact JC Coffey for further information.