Networked Aviation Urban Climate Stations

Our proposed urban microclimate weather system would provide weather situational awareness throughout the route of flight over multiple and varied flight paths, with all the relevant weather information a pilot needs, doing so with automatic continuous weather reporting that is then digested in a form that provides need-to-know situational awareness and alerting for an urban flight planner. The innovation is a networked weather information capability that is essential to flight in the urban environment, tailored to the urban environment, with the suitable level of timeliness and detail to allow urban flight dispatch. The concept is designed to be self-operating and self-powering, to enable the weather stations to be situated virtually anywhere and deliver networked information to a dispatcher at a local or distant location. Additionally, this concept begins to develop the precepts of urban weather forecasting, first by building a database of urban weather for mining, and by beginning to derive weather lessons from the collected data.

NAUCS will contribute directly to achieving NASA research objectives for the Advanced Air Mobility Project by providing networked weather stations for early testing at NASA Center test sites. Weather data availability is an important constraint on urban flight operations and NAUCS offers access to data for early testing and later evaluation in realistic operational environments. These deployments will generate data for use in analyzing vehicle performance and integration with flight planning, fleet monitoring, and trajectory management.

NAUCS will provide a service required by UAM and drone delivery operators. Once integrated into flight planning and monitoring, NAUCS will enable safer and more efficient operations by avoiding hazards and unexpected power drains.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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