A concept of UAV meteorological observation network for application to UAM operation

Urban air mobility (UAM) is a promising transport system in megacities in the near future. Urban meteorological data is crucial for operating UAM safely and confidently. To obtain the in-situ meteorological data such as wind, turbulence, air temperature, relative humidity, visibility, snow and icing, we have designed a concept of UAV meteorological observation network for application to UAM operation. The target area is Korean UAM testbed located in Ulsan metropolitan area including a couple of vertiports and corridor with a vertical range from the ground to 600 m and a horizontal range up to 30 km from the vertiports. The UAV platform consists of several rotary-wing UAVs and a couple of fixed-wing UAVs, which is equipping multiple meteorological sensors and a high resolution camera. In addition to the observation points within the UAM testbed, an inflow site is selected for simultaneous UAV meteorological observation to provide the essential input data to a micro-to-mesoscale numerical modeling system. The preliminary observation results showed that the accuracy and consistency of observation data were improved by adopting newly-designed meteorological sensors and providing the quality control procedure. We found that the hazardous weather phenomena such as wind shear, low visibility, and sleet/icing could be captured by utilizing the UAV meteorological observation network in addition to the ground meteorological observation network. This work was funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program under Grant RS-2024-00404042.