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06 May 2010

Goals

  • First deployment with VORTEX2 armada.
  • Intercept set for NW Kansas as of 14:41 local time.
  • UAS crew will attempt a boundary transect well in front of the storm.

Flight Review

First flight with V2 armada, with both position and meteorology data being reported over SASSI to the rest of the group. Take off went well, and mission proceeded as expected. The UA was able to track the Tracker for the entire flight, but the routing table caused the communications to go through the laptop for both the UA and MNR. Possible solution might be to use a wired interface to the laptop to force a route, but that eliminates the redundancy of the ad-hoc setup. The tracking antenna worked well, but 900MHz comms were slightly weaker than normal.

It was reported that the UA flew through the lobes of a couple radar scans, so its possible that caused some of the comms issues. Also -- at one point in time the UA flew right over FC, hopefully they got a good look at our platform. Light was a bit flat for landing making it slightly difficult, but it proceeded well.

Tempest1.5 Flight 1

    Coordinated with Armada: Yes
    Ground Station Location: 40.090816,-103.794960
    Launch/Landing: 00:01/00:45
    Flight Time: 44:15
    CoA Area: 2009-CSA-37
    Flight Description: E-W along CR-74

    Engineering Notes

    Summary

    CoA limited us to remain South of the target storm, but the team was able to sample for the entirety of the 45 minute flight. 900 MHz was not as strong as normal, and the Tracker reported some 802.11 issues on the way out. Overall no real issues, good test flight.

    Data

    Meteorology Notes

    Summary

    First flight with V2 armada. Storm tracked along the southern border of 2009-CSA-35-CoA so deployment south of the storm required a track along the northern border of 2009-CSA-37-CoA about 8 mi south of the hook.

    Preliminary analysis and general observations
    • I was hoping that the UA passed into the elevated warm sector feeding the storm but that doesn't appear to be the case. A ceiling above 1000 ft *might* have allowed us to capture this.
    • There are a couple of coherent features that may indicate airmass boundaries.
      • 00:41 - Equiv. potential temperature and water vapor mixing ratio decrease during the northward branch of the outbound portion of the track. Seems to be too far ahead of the storm to be a gust front but airmass behavior in these elevated cases may depart from archetypes.
      • 01:05 - Water vapor mixing ratio drops during the last westward segment of the inbound portion of the track. This feature is quite perplexing. Could be a gust front I guess but I wouldn't expect the signal to be restricted to the mixing ratio only.
    • The wind observations are somewhat suspect. It seems that changes in UA motion affect the wind velocity.
    Data