SCALES

My Role

• Led the design, organization, and execution of the Small-UAS Coordination for Atmospheric Low-Level Environmental Sampling (SCALES) project, which operated as the 2024 ISARRA Flight Week.
• Coordinated international participants from government, academic, and private sectors.
• Project goals included: MesoSCALES (3D mesonet deployment), MicroSCALES (urban Tulsa deployment), and Technical (UAS safety case).
• Served as the largest US component and final part of the WMO’s UAS Demonstration Campaign.

SCALES (Small-Small-UAS Coordination for Atmospheric Low-Level Environmental Sampling)

SCALES is the 2024 Flight Week associated with the annual meeting of the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA). SCALES has three key sub-objectives:

1. MicroSCALES is focused in the Tulsa, OK urban area, and has two sub-parts itself. The UHI (urban heat island) component aims to characterize how differences in sensible and latent heat in the lower atmosphere between urban and rural land cover manifests in thermodynamic vertical profiles examined through the lens of their theoretical impact on deep convection. The turbulence sampling component focuses on urban-induced turbulence and will provide important datasets for validating high-fidelity large eddy simulations like those from NCAR’s FastEddy.

2. MesoSCALES is deploying a 3D mesonet with at least 10 sites between Tulsa and the I-35 corridor. These profiles will provide crucial context for MicroSCALES and test the 3D mesonet concept, expanding beyond previous limited multisite deployments. Bringing mesoscale observing networks into the vertical opens doors for improvements in data assimilation, model verification, human forecasting, artificial intelligence applications, climate monitoring, seasonal-to-subseasonal prediction, and many more applications across a diverse range of disciplines.

3. Lastly, SCALES integrates recent technical advancements and aims to standardize data formats according to WMO guidelines. This coordination supports the WMO UAS Demonstration Campaign and addresses diverse research interests in the ISARRA community.

Beyond just the science and research we intend to do with these observations, SCALES intends to advance understanding of the observation and data systems required for rapid weather reporting, flight planning, and airspace management crucial for increasing busy and complex low-altitude operations associated with the future of uncrewed delivery and mobility, increased use of drones in general, and more. SCALES includes direct collaboration with Urban Air Mobility stakeholders, demonstrating airspace deconfliction tools and capabilities for safe UAS operations beyond visual line of sight limits. We are working to showcase our current capabilities and demonstrate the possibilities for future advanced air mobility and national airspace integration or multiple types of systems.

mesoSCALES

Leads: Elizabeth Smith, Tyler Bell Adding boundary layer profiling capabilities to meteorological mesonets has been slow progress. Remote profilers are one option, but these instruments are expensive and a single profiling site requires at least two for both thermodynamic and kinematic profiling. UAS are capable of acquiring both thermodynamic and kinematic profiles with one system and may be more cost-effective than remote-sensing profilers. At the moment, especially in the US, unattended UAS operations face regulatory barriers and fully automated systems are still a niche service. Considering costs and challenges associated with creating a boundary layer profiling network, optimal design and resulting impact or ‘return on investment’ of such a network must be understood before investment is made. Flight week offers the opportunity to deploy many UAS across mesonet sites to pilot the 3D mesonet concept, with several opportunities to profile meteorological phenomena. Depending on the synoptic pattern and evolution of local meteorology, different coordinated sampling outcomes could be realized (e.g., frontal passages, a tropical system, quiescent diurnal cycle, low-level jet, etc.). The meteorological research and analysis depends on the weather. However, in any scenario there are opportunities to:

• Explore representation of atmospheric evolution in time and space in a 3D mesonet
• Investigate and develop of a variety of value added product types enabled by networked profiles
• Compare spatial and temporal representation of the lower atmosphere from a 3D mesonet to numerical tools used in operational forecasting and warning operations (e.g., NOAA’s Rapid Refresh Forecast System, Storm Prediction Center Mesoanalysis, NSSL’s Warn on Forecast System, and other similar products and tools)
• Evaluate 3D mesonet configurations including site spacing, heterogeneous vs homogeneous instrumentation, profiling rates, etc.
• Assess the impact of improved representation of the mesoscale environment via assimilation of mesoSCALES observations on capturing the mean and turbulence structure of the lower atmosphere in and around Tulsa (overlaps microSCALES objectives)

microSCALES

Leads: Adam Houston, James Pinto

Urbanization impacts the atmosphere in many ways. It can yield enhanced heating of the surface in areas altered by human activities, also known as the urban heat island (UHI). Urban, human-modified landscapes can modify the boundary layer leading to localized variations in atmospheric moisture, winds, and turbulence flow characteristics. These features generally occur on scales smaller than the mesoscale, posing challenges for observation and numerical representation. Human impacts are large in these settings. UHI can lead to higher daytime temperatures, reduced nighttime cooling, increased energy consumption for cooling, and subsequent poorer air quality. Risks to human comfort and health are vast: heat-related deaths outpace those by all other weather risks combined. At the same time, advances in Urban Air Mobility, which can improve quality of life, require new weather guidance products that account for impacts of the urban landscape on winds and turbulence. Deploying observing platforms with microscale spatial coverage enables researchers to understand the extent, character, and evolution of urbanization impacts on atmospheric properties. However, surface-based measurements are insufficient to characterize the kinematic and thermodynamic impacts of urbanization. Doing so requires that we capture vertical profiles of key variables at several points in and around an urban region to provide a 3D assessment of lower-atmosphere structure and evolution, which is critically important to increase understanding of processes driving UHI, properly characterizing upscale influences of microscale processes on mesoscale phenomena, and validating high-resolution, high-fidelity large eddy simulations over urban regions. All of these outcomes are beneficial to urban air mobility concepts. Microscale atmospheric processes in urban environments must be well-understood, well-represented in high- resolution simulations, and well-predicted to enable safe and successful low-altitude autonomous flight. Flight Week offers the opportunity to deploy multiple UAS in and around the Tulsa metropolitan area and to:

• Sample UHI impacts on atmospheric stability to explain observed patterns in deep convection near urban areas
• Sample impacts of urban landscapes on variations in wind and turbulence characteristics
• Utilize a combination of vertical profiling and horizontal transects to derive turbulence measurements in the urban environment
• Characterize the diurnal evolution of the urban thermodynamic plume, the upwind urban-rural boundary, and urban-center convergence
• Contribute to development of datasets to support validation of high-resolution, building-resolving large eddy simulation models
• Contribute urban perspectives to a larger 3-D mesonet concept, including but not limited to the assessment of the impact improved representation of the mesoscale environment via assimilation of mesoSCALES observations may have on capturing the mean and turbulence structure of the lower atmosphere in and around Tulsa (overlaps mesoSCALES objectives)