2024 AGENDA

A persistent and cross-cutting challenge, as UAS and AAM missions and operating domains continue to expand, mature, and diversify, is identifying and mitigating impactful urban, suburban, and terrain-influenced microscale weather conditions to ensure safe and efficient UAS/AAM operations.

It has been shown that hazardous conditions in urban and suburban environments can vary greatly given the time of day or larger-scale wind/environmental conditions which are further perturbed by the built environment. Without sufficient weather observations and forecasts at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales, assessing operating risks will continue to be a challenge for UAS/AAM missions. Enhancements and findings from this research exploring microscale weather modeling have demonstrated a path forward for not only evaluating the microscale urban and suburban weather hazard conditions, but also to allow for enhanced services that enable improved planning, training, and safeguarding that reduce weather risks, for safer, more sustainable, and scalable UAS and AAM operations.

The presentation will focus on weather modeling research that has led to the development of a derived winds/turbulence hazard translation product applicable to UAS and AAM operations. This hazard product, known as Shake and Sharp(trademarked) was further refined and corroborated, by emulating and evaluating a known UAS accident scenario in an urban environment in the microscale weather modeling environment, and assessing the validity of UAS microscale weather hazard identification.