Drones are filling the skies over the San Luis Valley

Colorado’s San Luis Valley has long been a hotbed for sightings of strange things in the sky, but this week it is not UFOs that are causing the buzz.

Hundreds of drone flights have taken to the skies near Alamosa as part of what is billed as Flight Week, mounted by the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely Piloted Aircraft, which last week held its 2018 conference in Boulder.

This is far more than clever men and women simply showing off the latest in pilotless flying machines. Scientists taking part in the drone-a-thon are taking measurements by drone to better understand how storms form and build. Other questions being examined include an exploration of how irrigation can change weather patterns, and whether the growth of cattle can be measured by drone.

Personnel from the University of Colorado’s Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing team are on hand, as are scientists from CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — along with unmanned aircraft enthusiasts from around the country.

Also participating are representatives of Boulder’s Black Swift Technologies, which manufactures two different fixed-wing flight platforms being used. They also offered training to the scientists on the correct operation of the aircraft.

“It’s one of the larger campaigns of this kind ever, for the number of platforms involved,” said Black Swift CEO Jack Elston, who was in southern Colorado for the first few days, but is now back in Boulder.

Overseeing the week’s activities is Gijs de Boer, a research scientist at CIRES and NOAA, who just over a week ago published a paper on the use of drones in collecting weather data in harsh or remote environments such as the Arctic.

“So far, everything is going very well,” de Boer said from Alamosa. He said close to 10 different groups, each with between two and eight aircraft, are mounting an average of about 200 flights per day, “which is really incredible.”

The area was selected for the week’s events in part due to the diversity of terrain in the high altitude valley, featuring farmland, grassland, rivers and sand dunes, all surrounded by tall mountain peaks.