SGER: Formation Flying of Rapidly Deployable Remotely Piloted Vehicles for Mesoscale Meteorological Observations

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Ground-based mobile observational facilities have proven to be of great value in studying transient atmospheric phenomena such as tornadoes and gust fronts. Under this Small Grant for Exploratory Research, the Principal Investigator will begin development of a small, airborne, remotely piloted vehicle. These platforms will be designed to be launched rapidly from ground based mobile facilities. The ultimate objective is to develop a command aircraft, which will be controlled from the ground, and several accompanying aircraft that will maintain a preprogrammed, fixed orientation to the command aircraft. Each aircraft will carry instruments to measure temperature, pressure and relative humidity. The work under this grant is to develop the software that will control the command and one additional "slave" aircraft. If this research is successful, eventual development of such a measurement system will help extend ground-based observations into the vertical dimension and allow diagnostic studies that are not currently possible.