Safe Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) operations and airspace management depend on accurate weather data to make critical decisions, plan fleet asset tasking, schedule cargo or people movements, reduce flight uncertainty and meet client expectations. Accurate weather data requires a robust, autonomous and reliable sensing platform capable of detecting multiple weather hazards across urban, suburban and rural domains.
TruWeather Solutions has a NASA Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research project to develop a Wind Hazard Impact Location Service (WHILS) in Hampton, VA that we will integrate into our In-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) platform. TruWeather seeks to expand beyond “wind” to “weather.” This project seeks to expand the service into the Weather Hazard Information Location Service (WHILS2.) Weather hazards impactful to AAM include wind, turbulence, ceiling, and visibility. The TruFlite suite of services currently includes global, regional and local scale weather products. The goal of WHILS2 is to predict when and where it is safe to conduct a UAS urban mission, where urban corridors can be planned. This project will focus on hazardous weather detection in low-altitude, urban environments enabled by the accelerated deployment of a robust weather multi-sensor platform scalable to urban area in the world.
We will develop algorithms to retrieve different weather parameters from a set of sensors. We will validate the retrieved data against other weather data sets, including modelled data. Once validated, we will assess the influence of the retrieved data on urban routes using our route optimization capability RouteCAST. The goal is to enhance our ISSA platform with WHILS2 to detect and predict “hot spots” that drones should avoid. This project will expand and accelerate identification of weather hazard areas to keep airframes and people safe as we test, demonstrate, and deploy initial UAS operations to achieve Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Maturity Level-4.
This initiative enables NASA applications that depend on highly reliable and persistent non-government space, atmospheric and terrestrial measurements and predictions:
UAS and UAM is a “blue sky” mission area to demonstrate how weather monitoring systems, especially in urban areas, can reduce the impact of hazardous events to mission critical operations.
Our applications for this technology extend to FAA and commercial endeavors of the same mission areas that NASA is working in, namely:
We are also looking at how cities can use urban micro weather data as part of Smart City initiatives by deploying weather sensing platforms.