ADELPHI, Md. -- Officials with the Army Research Laboratory announced its meteorological expertise has led to modifications in commercial weather instruments now promising to improve the accuracy of weather forecast models. These models are of critical importance to military operations, they said.
For the first time, a remotely-piloted aircraft collected an extensive, fine-resolution, high-quality meteorological dataset using the Tropospheric Airborne Meteorological Data Reporting for unmanned aircraft, or TAMDAR-U.
The instrument is a weather monitoring system using sensors mounted on ordinary commercial aircraft for gathering data. Up until now, RPAs generated readings that were only viewable by their pilots and could not be disseminated to other users or for ingest into weather forecast models. remotely-piloted aircraft also have no mechanism in place to conduct quality control checks on the data they produce.
TAMDAR-U, on the other hand, transmits its data up to a satellite network from anywhere in the world, and the meteorological observations are transmitted to a ground station where extensive quality checks are run, explained TAMDAR-U project test director Terry C. Jameson, a meteorologist from the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command's ARL Atmospheric Modeling Application Branch at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
Jameson explained that after transmission to a ground station, the data are reformatted properly such that they can be ingested into weather forecast models.
"The TAMDAR-U collects a full suite of Met data, including temperature, humidity, pressure, winds and the presence of icing conditions, turbulence, as well as precise position and time information - which is crucial for utilizing the data in weather forecasting models," he said.
The sensor-based technology will help quantify the effects of weather on battlefield personnel, equipment and operations, Jameson added.
The Army Research Laboratory's role in the project is to organize and conduct the tests of the instrument. As such, ARL officials developed the flight test profiles to optimize the data collection opportunities, designed the data analyses methodology, and will conduct the evaluations of the datasets that are collected.
The Army Research Laboratory is collaborating with New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory, which operates the Aerostar RPA and provides all the associated ground support and flight control personnel and equipment. ARL provides the meteorological expertise.
Initial flights to test instrument calibration were conducted as required by AirDat, the company that developed TAMDAR-U, to ensure the instrument was producing accurate positioning and heading readings.
More recently, the team conducted an actual data collection flight (of just over three hours in duration), during which a full observation dataset was obtained. These data will be entered into one of the weather prediction models to assess the potential gain in forecast accuracy that might be realized. Two additional data collection flights are planned during the summer of 2010.
After the three dedicated data collection flights are conducted, and the weather forecast model accuracy assessments are completed, the TAMDAR-U instrument is slated to remain on board the Aerostar RPA for at least an additional 18 months for continued evaluation of new datasets as they become available.
"It is hoped that ultimately this proof-of-concept research will pave the way for instruments like TAMDAR-U to be deployed on battlefield RPAs," Jameson said. "Battlefield Met observations are currently extremely sparse, and data being collected by RPAs promises to fill a significant void."
He said his next projects involve the development of weather-based decision support tools and evaluations of battlefield artillery meteorology systems.
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