Urban Weather Sensing Infrastructure Testbed

The TruWeather Solutions team is proposing to develop a suite of innovative services to increase the reliability, robustness, and usability of urban weather data. Phase I focused on the design of the Urban WeatherEXperiment(UWEX), finding the best urban area with plans for flight tests and high commercial opportunities, searching for sensing solutions and their optimal locations, assessing the potential impact of their observations on predictions and mission planning. The UWEX multi-sensor campaign that will be carried out in Phase II will include spinning lidars, x-band radar and anemometers. We focused this effort on low altitude, urban environments where a significant observation gap remains and that have specific complex micro-weather challenges to enable routine UAS operations. In Phase II, we are proposing to deploy the sensors, validate their data and develop a set of services that will support decision-making tools for UAS operators and navigators. These services will be scalable across multiple urban domains worldwide. Once the sensors are deployed and the data validated. This data will be unique and valuable dataset for robust model evaluation and validation. Besides, this data willbe thebasis of real-time and predictive wind and ceiling products. Moreover, these products will undergo testing by operators through real urban flight testing and third party testing to demonstrate to AAM stakeholders and clients the reliability and scalability of these solutions. Phase II will also focus on how weather contributes to a UAS operation risk assessment for both strategic and tactical planning. Since the future weather data and predictions sent to users rely on accurate and reliable wind sensor, verifying the validity of the wind sensor input data will enable trust of the output data created by TruWeather Solutions and its partners. Current weather sensors that support aviation operations are insufficient to meet the emerging micro-weather challenges for high velocity Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations, especially in high risk urban areas. The sensor infrastructure is not granular enough to capture micro-weather winds, which pose unique challenges to electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) and drones. The low altitude weather data gap is well documented and accepted in the science and aviation community. The project relevance is to change the weather sensing paradigm through distributed adaptive sensing, improved low-altitude wind measurements, and to demonstrate that the commercialization of micro-weather data collection, processing and delivery service will serve the AAM industry. This gap highlights the need for reliable sensing capabilities tailored to AAM and UML-4 needs. Monitoring and predicting the weather with a local ecosystem of sensing, prediction, and communication is critical to meet FAA requirements for high-data integrity, reliability, and system predictability. During Phase II, our technical objectives are: Deploy live sensors namely spinning lidars, x-band radar and anemometers across an urban environment to collect real-time wind data. Validate the collected data and ensure the data accuracy. The Phase II proposed deliverable is to demonstrate new services prime for commercialization to support UAM based on the UWEX. There are four identified new services that we intend to develop and create under Phase II: Low-Level Wind Shear Detection (LLWSD) service that will provide real-time risk profiles based on wind speed and shear data from the deployed sensors, with a focus on vertiport locations and key routes. Wind Hazard Impact Location Service (WHILS) that will provide predictions of winds and shear based the UWEX data using ML. WHILS will be able to provide wind-based “No-Fly/Fly” guidance over both the route and the vertiport. Safe Entry Point Service (SEPS) products to determine the safest entry point, based on wind risk, to an urban area when a vehicle is transitioning from the route to the vertiport. Enhanced Rapid Refresh (ER2) products that will be corrected wind predictions with lidar, radar and anemometers data and this capability will more accurately forecast winds in addition to improve the timing and position of LLWS zones.
Benefits: NASA will find this effort useful in the National Campaign effort around Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM) and in conducting planned High Density Vertiport testing and demonstrations in the Hampton Roads region. As NASA look at vertiport locations and urban flight routes, it will be crucial how different sensors can contribute to a reliable UTM ecosystem. Additionally, capabilities developed will directly contribute to NASA System Wide Safety Team mission to enable In-time system-wide safety assurance (ISSA) capabilities within the AAM ecosystem. There is a push for “Smart Cities” initiatives in the US right now. Our sensing, modeling solutions and services fits perfectly into this concept. We can provide a scalable solution for domain-specific applications to understand what capabilities and regions are impacted by adverse or off-nominal weather conditions detected within the ecosystem.