Urban Weather Sensing Infrastructure Testbed

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations and airspace management depend on accurate weather data for safe, sustainable, affordable and accessible services.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Accurate urban weather data requires a robust, autonomous and reliable sensing and data processing system capable of detecting and communicating weather hazards in near-real time.nbsp;TruWeather Solutions (TWS) is addressing wind challenges that impact small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Urban Air Mobility (UAM) airframes.nbsp; TWS seeks to underpin an aviation metropolitan based weather sensing and prototype testbed architecture resulting in a Wind Hazard Impact Location Service (WHILS) to better characterize wind impacts for operators and airspace managers.nbsp; WHILS will integrate into our In-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) platform, TruFlite V360. WHILS will inform when and where it is safe to fly, and which corridors and vertiports will provide the safest route(s) of transit and locations for terminal operations. This project will focus on low-altitude, urban environments to accelerate deployment of a robust urban wind sensing platform scalable to any urban area in the world.nbsp;We will develop our urban wind hazard framework with the goal of a proof-of-concept demonstration in Phase 2 that will highlight wind and wind shear ldquo;hotspotsrdquo; of all types. We will quantify the potential impact of sensor fusion and the collected data on wind predictions using simulated observations.nbsp; We will assess the influence of this service on selecting optimal routes using our route optimization capability RouteCast.nbsp;Our vision is to enhance TruFlite V360 with a low altitude urban weather model capable of detecting and predicting urban wind ldquo;hot spotsrdquo; and hazards to avoid. This initial model will accelerate commercialization of an important data set to keep airframes and people safe as we test, demonstrate, and deploy initial UAS operations in urban environments in order to reach UAM Maturity Level-4.