Sensing Weather for Advanced Air Mobility

Accurate monitoring of weather conditions is critical (particularly at low altitudes) to ensure safe and efficient Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) aviation. While permanently installed weather sensors exist at local airports for traditional aviation, AAM will magnify the points of departure by orders of magnitude, necessitating hyper-local weather sensing at lower cost and with increased portability. ASTM International has formed a working group to establish the ASTM F3673-23 standard specifically to address this need even though no currently available sensors fully meet the performance and cost targets required by AAM. To address the gap in available weather sensing technologies, Intellisense Systems, Inc. (Intellisense) proposes to develop the Sensing Weather for Advanced Air Mobility (SWAAMI) system, the first commercial system specifically targeted at meeting ASTM F3673-23 Tier 2 performance standards. It will be low cost to promote widespread adoption and deployment and suitable for fixed or portable use. The SWAAMI system will be based on a novel integration of existing and emerging breakthrough technologies. Specifically, Intellisense will modify its existing portable Micro Weather Station product to include the latest in optical precipitation and present-weather sensing technologies to form the SWAAMI system, which will be the first of its kind in a product category that will become essential to AAM operations, measuring temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, atmospheric visibility, present weather, cloud height, lightning, icing, and additional derived parameters, all in an integrated, hand-portable system. Funding will be used to develop and demonstrate a prototype of this system in Phase I and to begin marketing it within the AAM weather sensing space in which Intellisense is well established. Phase II will focus on increasing maturity, test installations for early adopters, and updates to F3673-23 release.

The proposed SWAAMI weather sensor specifically addresses NASA’s goal of advancing AAM for the economic and transportation benefits it presents nationally. The SWAAMI system will address all of the use cases that NASA identified in this topic area and is specifically ideally suited for supporting disaster relief, firefighting, search and rescue, medivac, and special events. SWAAMI also supports NASA’s science mission, particularly involving terrestrial and environmental research, or any research in which measurement of weather or climate is relevant. The portability of the SWAAMI system and its ability to be operated on solar and battery power is unique among weather sensors with the capabilities required for safety of flight. As envisioned, the primary applications for the SWAAMI system are to advance adoption of AAM outside of NASA, so the primary application is a non-NASA application. In addition to this primary application in the commercial AAM arena, additional non-NASA commercial applications for the SWAAMI system include applications in wildland firefighting, power utility environmental monitoring and safety, support of oil and gas operations, smart city enhancements, and green energy applications such as wind energy assessment. In particular, the portability of the SWAAMI system and its ability to be operated on solar and battery power, including all optical sensors is unique among weather sensors. The portability of the system also avoids infrastructural costs normally required for larger sensors that require larger mounting structures and either line power or generators.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — 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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