Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) for in-situ measurements across an air-sea interface

Interactions across an air-sea interface are fundamental features of Earth’s climate system with substantial implications for ecosystems. Diurnal variations of local exchange between atmosphere and ocean impacts both environments and rectifies into longer and larger scale through interactions with mesoscale circulation. Therefore, such local processes can influence evolution of weather patterns. At the same time, atmosphere and ocean models struggle with the realistic representation of diurnal variations across an air-sea interface. It is related to gaps in our understating of physical mechanisms behind these interactions which stems from a fact that collocated, reliable measurements within coupled atmosphere and ocean environment, spanning across an air-sea interface are rare.

Emergence of the Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) enables a new opportunity for sampling across air-sea interface. A multirotor UAS equipped with atmosphere and/or ocean measurement capability can be launch from a vessel (e.g. research vessel) and perform measurements in its vicinity, but in flow not obstructed by ship’s structure. In this presentation, observations collected over ocean tropical and subtropical Atlantic, as well as in the coastal zone will be presented. Profiles were collected in both oceanic (temperature profile, top 5m of the ocean) and atmospheric (temperature and humidity, surface to 500m). Therefore, measurements were conducted in the area not only obstructed by vessel’s sole presence but also unreachable by remote sensing techniques. Results demonstrate capability of ocean and atmosphere sensing UAS to measure coupled variability across an air-sea interface.