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.