Unmanned Aerial Systems for Investigating the Troposphere: Developments and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce this Special Issue of Atmosphere which aims at presenting the state-of-the-art developments of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and their applications for investigating atmospheric processes between the Earth’s surface and the tropopause.

Your submissions introducing innovative designed platforms and scientific sensors, performed field experiments and acquired atmospheric data are welcome.

In particular, we invite you to present your platforms, sensors and concepts (including assimilation in NWP) to be deployed in the near future (e.g., for the worldwide WMO UAS Demonstration Campaign in 2024) and data sets which are validated with numerical weather simulations on small-scale or large-scale. Further, we encourage all authors to share their experiences with UAS in challenging field applications, for instance, in polar areas, high altitude, complex terrain, sub-/urban and critical areas, i.e., those that are influenced by complex terrain, clouds and high wind speeds. In particular, those studies and direct comparisons with in situ data, such as those based on weather masts, Eddy-covariance stations, and remote-sensing, e.g., LIDAR, that are performed at the same time or in parallel with other airborne platforms or in swarms, will be given priority, but are not a limiting criterion.

The UAS investigations may address fundamental basic approaches in the fields of physical and chemical analyzes, such as the study of wind fields, transport, and turbulence, or could address the high-frequency profiles of aerosols, trace gases or pollutants that help to identify emission hot spots which are directly affecting our human health.

Besides applied operations, technical and regulatory aspects are also very much welcome, as a path towards integration of UAS data into operational meteorology and research, including data management and assimilation.

Dr. Konrad Bärfuss
Dr. Barbara Harm-Altstädter
Guest Editors

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