The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is busy these days, tracking the formation and movement of powerful storms during another above-average hurricane season. NOAA’s mission goes far beyond telling the country when and where a tropical storm might hit, however.
“NOAA is in charge of studying everything, from up in the sky to down to the bottom of the ocean,” says Katie Sweeney, a biologist at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center Marine Mammal Laboratory.
For years now, NOAA has used unmanned aerial systems, better known as drones, to
help it fulfill a variety of its missions, from forecasting weather to monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions and protecting fisheries and marine mammals.
The drones NOAA uses have become increasingly sophisticated, and the agency is
using edge computing and the cloud to more efficiently gather, analyze and disseminate data that they collect in the field. NOAA’s drones also leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to better study hurricanes and keep track of populations of seals in Alaska.
NOAA Uses Drones to See Inside Hurricanes
Most of
the drones used in the government have bene developed by the Defense Department and defense industry, and NOAA has been able to take advantage of some of those investments, according to Phil Hall, director of the uncrewed systems program in the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations at NOAA.
However, those drones are typically not tailored to NOAA’s needs, so the agency uses a “mix between specialized UAS that might be used to measure weather, or we’re also using a lot of commercial off-the-shelf, rather inexpensive systems and modifying those for NOAA uses,” Hall says.
“In some parts of NOAA, they have really exploded and have become a must-have technology,” Hall adds.
Joseph Cione, lead research meteorologist for NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory’s Hurricane Research Division, notes that scientists have long conducted manned reconnaissance of storms through old-school “hurricane hunting.”
However,
drones can provide NOAA and other researchers with more detailed information that can help communities prepare for disasters. “We live in the boundary layer, we live low, we don’t live at 20,000 feet,” Cione says. “So, when storms make landfall, we want to know what the winds are doing right at that boundary layer.”
NOAA notes that the agency does not want to fly manned planes low, for safety purposes. Like the Navy, NOAA uses P-3 aircraft to fly into hurricanes. The Navy suggested to NOAA that it follows its lead and drop drones out of P-3 planes into hurricanes. “So we did, and it worked,” Cione says.
NOAA had “some great success” with this approach between 2014 and 2018, Cione says. The agency learned several lessons from using the drones, but because they were designed from the military, Cione wanted to design something from scratch. The drone would need to be sophisticated and intelligent.
“We have every intention of making these things artificial intelligence-driven,” Cione says.
According to Cione, the AI-driven drones are not automated in such a way that they are dropped out of planes and then fly only one preplanned route. “Each storm is different, so that won’t work,” he says.
“As it’s flying, it senses what’s going on,” Cione adds. “It’s using its sensors, its machine learning, its artificial intelligence, understanding its environment, making decisions based upon the sensors and then going into the environment that we want it to go into.”
Such tools show the “potential for these systems to really leverage and increase our ability to get more data in these locations,” Hall says.
Those AI tools will enable NOAA to gain “situational awareness in a storm that is going to make landfall,” Cione says. That can help NOAA and state and local authorities evacuate communities with more precision. “You save lives,” Cione says.
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https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2021/09/how-noaa-uses-drones-study-everything-seals-hurricanes
