Current and Future Uses of UAS for Improved Forecasts/Warnings and Scientific Studies

Workshop on Current and Future Uses of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) for Improved Forecasts/Warnings and Scientific Studies What: Sixty-three participants including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and senior researchers working in the atmospheric sciences at U.S. and international universities, private companies, and government laboratories met to discuss scientific applications of UASs. [...]observational requirements for model applications (i.e., how many, where, and when) need to be better established, and may be pursuable through coordinated sampling campaigns. [...]the fourth session (additional atmospheric applications of UAS and other scientific discussions) included discussion and presentations on the potential for UAS to contribute to our understanding of cloud properties, aerosols, surface and radiative fluxes, stress terms, complex flows, albedo, surface heterogeneity, vegetation indices, photogrammetry, site surveys, and ocean properties. Currently, there is no gold standard for the often challenging comparisons that need to be made between data from UAS-mounted instrumentation and data from other sensors (e.g., towers, radiometers, lidar, radiosondes). [...]the biggest need for making progress on establishing confidence in UAS data is a reference platform or set of reference instruments that could be robustly tested.