Weather Testbed for Urban Air Mobility

ClimaCell, in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, proposes the development of an innovative Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Weather Testbed to provide weather information at a high-resolution to capture fine-scale phenomena impactful to future UAM operations.nbsp; The testbed will consider the use of currently available sensors, as well as other advanced technology to meet current low-altitude weather information gaps to facilitate safe and efficient UAM operations.nbsp; Using artificial intelligence and numerical weather prediction approaches, the sparse weather observations will be used to analyze current weather conditions at high-resolution in three-dimensions and produce forecasts with products tailored for the UAM community.nbsp; In designing this prototype network, input from a variety of UAM stakeholders will be solicited to ensure that the network will meet their anticipated needs, and the interaction will continue as the network is built out for additional feedback.nbsp; This Phase I work will include a weather information gaps assessment, architecture design for an urban weather testbed for UAM, and identification of suitable municipalities for hosting a build out of a prototype testbed.nbsp; In a follow-on Phase II effort, the network would be built out in at least one municipality and the high-resolution data would be marketed to additional customers beyond the UAM community to sustain a network in the interim, given that it is expected to be a number of years until a critical mass of UAM customers exists to pay for the network maintenance.