FAA clears CU team’s drones for weather study

BOULDER — A consortium led by the University of Colorado Boulder will begin flying drones over 54,000 square miles of Texas and Oklahoma this spring to do weather research in the heart of “Tornado Alley,” after receiving permission from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The consortium, which includes CU-Boulder’s Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles and researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Texas Tech University, received a Certificate of Authorization from the FAA to operate a Tempest drone over parts of the Panhandle region known for its extreme weather, including “supercell” storms that can spawn damaging winds, large hail and tornadoes.

The new “southern COA” complements the 48,000-square-mile “northern COA” previously granted by the FAA to the consortium that covers portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming, said RECUV director and CU-Boulder aerospace engineering science professor Eric Frew.

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The unmanned Tempest has a wingspan of more than 10 feet. Developed at CU-Boulder, the drone can help researchers better understand the origin and development of severe storms by flying to their edges and measuring air pressure, temperature, relative humidity and wind velocities, Frew said.

The first project under the new authorization will be the deployment of a Tempest near Lubbock, Texas, during the last two weeks of June. The project will include the team from CU-Boulder and Nebraska and a mobile Doppler radar team from Texas Tech, all of which participated in the massive Vortex-2 Project in spring 2010. That project involved more than 100 researchers and 40 support vehicles that chased severe storms from South Dakota to Texas in a project spearheaded by the National Science Foundation and the Boulder-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

While the Lubbock activities this summer are designed to test new technologies, the team probably also would fly the drone into developing storms if the opportunities present themselves, said CU-Boulder aerospace engineering sciences professor Brian Argrow, a co-investigator on the project.

“The next step is to integrate the technology from this project into an unmanned aircraft system known as TTwistor, which is the successor to the Tempest,” said Argrow. TTwistor is being developed by RECUV with financial support from the Colorado Advanced Industries Accelerator Program and NOAA.

CU-Boulder is partnering with local companies UASUSA and Black Swift Technologies to develop the TTwistor. UASUSA is a company spun off from Skip Miller Models of Longmont, a company that began manufacturing and marketing the Tempest after the prototypes were developed and flown by RECUV in 2010. BST was founded in 2012 by several CU-Boulder graduates who helped to develop and deploy the Tempest while at the university.

“We are looking forward to future deployments of the TTwistor when we resume our severe-storm research with our partners from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,” said Argrow. Last fall, the universities co-founded the Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Severe Storms Research Group, a consortium of public and private-sector collaborators from universities, the private sector and others that are using drones to study severe storms.

In addition to intercepting storm cells associated with tornadoes in Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, CU-Boulder faculty and students also have experience using drones to monitor seal populations in the Arctic, chart sea-ice changes near Greenland and measure features in Antarctic sea ice associated with offshore winds.