Drones open possibility of pinpoint forecasts
Imagine a weather report so precise it provides wind-gust forecasts for individual city blocks. Such micro-weather data may soon become a reality-and a necessity for future fleets of delivery drones.
As Amazon.com, United Parcel Service, Domino’s Pizza and others gear up to launch autonomous drone deliveries of books, pills and pizza, companies are realizing it’s the quality of hyperlocal weather data more than anything else that will steer their packages around storm clouds and through windbuffeted urban canyons.
“The weather issue is a very significant one,” said Sean Cassidy, director of safety and regulatory affairs for Amazon’s drone unit.
The push is on to develop traffic-management systems that will forecast weather conditions down to a single city block, and at elevations as low as 400 feet. That promises to clear the way for the holy grail of drone service: automatic flights that make their rounds without pilots controlling them from the ground as they do now.
And it’s becoming clear that delivery drones themselves will play an increasingly important role in collecting weather conditions on their journeys through the sky, relaying that information to computer weather models and perhaps back to fleets of drones following behind.
Aviation weather reports are currently designed to cover mostly areas around airports, as well as the high altitudes where airplanes tend to fly. That’s why existing systems are so ill-equipped to help guide the thousands of small drone craft that are envisioned taking off and landing from diverse locales.
Weather reports for drones will rely on multilayered systems of ground-based weather gauges, sensors on the drones themselves, and data from national weather services, all feeding computer models, said Marcus Johnson, a research aerospace engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. “It’s not an easy solution,” he said.
Meteorologists dream of having sensors cover every square mile drones fly over, but doing so could be prohibitively expensive, said Jon Tarleton, chief of weather marketing in the Americas for Finland’s Vaisala, which manufactures most of the sensors used by the Federal Aviation Administration at airports.
“The problem is solvable in almost all cases. It just comes down to cost,” said Tarleton, whose company makes the weather balloons the National Weather Service sets loose each day to compile the national forecast.
BNSF Railway Co. — the only company in the U.S. flying drones long distances, a project it’s undertaken as part of an FAA study — has called back flights or kept them grounded because of the elements, said Todd Graetz, director of BNSF’s drone program. The railroad has a big advantage over other companies looking to begin operating drones: Sensors placed along its tracks provide trains with information on high winds and heavy rain that BNSF drone operators can tap into.