Meteorological Issues for Low-Altitude Economy

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Atmospheric Techniques, Instruments, and Modeling".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 551

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
Interests: atmospheric boundary layer; Doppler wind lidar; large-eddy simulation; turbulent flows; machine learning
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Guest Editor
Institute of Arid Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration, Lanzhou 730030, China
Interests: boundary-layer data assimilation; LES-EnKF integration; machine learning; high-resolution numerical simulation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Institute of Aeronautical Meteorology, Civil Aviation Flight University of China, Guanghan 618307, China
Interests: atmospheric boundary layer; large-eddy simulation; wind shear; wind power

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The low-altitude economy (typically referring to economic activities within the airspace from the ground to around 1000–2000 meters) is reshaping the future industrial ecosystem at an unprecedented pace. The explosive growth of emerging sectors such as drone logistics, urban air mobility (UAM), precision agricultural aviation, and low-altitude tourism is expected to produce a global market size of over CNY one trillion by 2030. However, this sustainable development is highly dependent on a deep understanding and precise forecasting of low-altitude meteorology, especially for the atmospheric boundary layer dynamic field.

This Special Issue of Atmosphere aims to cover papers related to all aspects of new and advanced meteorological techniques that can be applied for the development of the low-altitude economy, such as wind LiDAR remote sensing, the high-resolution modeling of complex-terrain dynamics, UAV measurements, and machine learning.

Dr. Yongjing Ma
Dr. Chongshui Gong
Dr. Dandan Zhao
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • atmospheric boundary layer dynamics
  • low-altitude economy
  • high-resolution wind prediction
  • turbulent motions
  • wind shear
  • machine learning

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

17 pages, 5835 KB  
Article
Evaluation of Aircraft Cloud Seeding for Ecological Restoration in the Shiyang River Basin Using Remote Sensing
by Wei Wang, Mei Zhang and Linfei Ma
Atmosphere 2025, 16(12), 1344; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos16121344 - 27 Nov 2025
Viewed by 209
Abstract
The use of aircraft for cloud seeding to enhance rainfall serves as an effective meteorological intervention and plays a vital role in ensuring ecological security within the context of the low-altitude economy. This study utilized ground-based precipitation observations from the Shiyang River Basin, [...] Read more.
The use of aircraft for cloud seeding to enhance rainfall serves as an effective meteorological intervention and plays a vital role in ensuring ecological security within the context of the low-altitude economy. This study utilized ground-based precipitation observations from the Shiyang River Basin, in conjunction with Landsat satellite remote sensing imagery (2000–2024), regional historical regression, vegetation index retrieval, and spectral mixture analysis, to evaluate the effectiveness of aircraft-based cloud seeding for enhancing rainfall. The normalized difference vegetation index and the fraction of vegetation cover were calculated to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics and growth patterns of surface vegetation before and after the implementation of this rainfall enhancement measure, thus offering a quantitative assessment of the ecological restoration effect in the Shiyang River Basin. A novel application of cloud-seeding technology for ecological recovery has been developed. It provides one of the first quantitative assessments of aircraft-based cloud seeding in inland river basins of China, linking meteorological intervention directly to measurable ecological restoration outcomes. The findings indicate that: (1) Aircraft-based cloud seeding for rainfall enhancement has yielded significant results, with an average relative precipitation increase of 20.8% (p < 0.1%) in the operational area; (2) Following the commencement of this rainfall enhancement practice in 2010, normalized difference vegetation index and fraction of vegetation cover values within the study area have shown a marked increase, with the percentage of regions with low vegetation coverage declining from 30.36% to 25.21%; and (3) Since the implementation of this measure in 2010, vegetation conditions in the Shiyang River Basin have generally stabilized, demonstrating substantial improvement and a reduction in degradation. The percentage of regions classified as improved or slightly improved increased significantly, from 14.20% before the implementation of this measure to 36.24%, indicating a transition in the vegetation ecosystem from localized enhancement to overall improvement. These results demonstrate that ecological restoration efforts in the Shiyang River Basin have shown considerable improvement after the introduction of aircraft-based cloud-seeding operations, resulting in significant increases in vegetation coverage throughout extensive regions of the basin. The research connects scientific results to policy and management, suggesting that low-altitude economy-based cloud seeding can play a key role in water resource management, ecological stability, and climate resilience. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Meteorological Issues for Low-Altitude Economy)
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