Search Results (3)

The Antarctic atmosphere is rapidly changing, but there are few observations available in the interior of the continent to quantify this change due to few ground stations and satellite measurements. The Concordia station is located on the East Antarctic Plateau (75° S, 123° E, 3233 m above mean sea level), one of the driest and coldest places on Earth. Several remote sensing instruments are available at the station to probe the atmosphere, together with operational meteorological sensors. In order to observe in situ clouds, temperature, relative humidity and supercooled liquid water (SLW) at a high vertical resolution, a new project based on the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) vertical take-off and landing from the DeltaQuad Company has been set up at Concordia. A standard Vaisala pressure, temperature and relative humidity sensor was installed aboard the drone coupled to an Anasphere SLW sensor. A total of thirteen flights were conducted from 24 December 2022 to 17 January 2023: nine technology flights and four science flights (on 2, 10, 11 and 13 January 2023). Drone-based temperature and relative humidity profiles were compared to (1) the balloon-borne meteorological observations at 12:00 UTC, (2) the ground-based microwave radiometer HAMSTRAD and (3) the outputs from the numerical weather prediction models ARPEGE and AROME. No SLW clouds were present during the period of observations. Despite technical issues with drone operation due to the harsh environments encountered (altitude, temperature and geomagnetic field), the drone-based observations were consistent with the balloon-borne observations of temperature and relative humidity. The radiometer showed a systematic negative bias in temperature of 2 °C, and the two models were, in the lowermost troposphere, systematically warmer (by 2–4 °C) and moister (by 10–30%) than the drone-based observations. Our study shows the great potential of a drone to probe the Antarctic atmosphere in situ at very high vertical resolution (a few meters). Full article

A digital automatic gain compensation (AGC) drone-borne K-band microwave radiometer with continuous high-speed acquisition and fast storage functions is designed and applied to obtain high-resolution radiation brightness temperature (TB) images. In this paper, the composition of the drone-borne passive microwave observation system is introduced, a data processing method considering the topography and angle correction is proposed, the error analysis of the projection process is carried out, and finally, a high-resolution microwave radiation TB image is obtained by a demonstration area experiment. The characteristics of the radiometer are tested by experiments, and the standard deviation of the TB is 1K. The data processing method proposed is verified using a demonstration case. The corrected data have a good correlation with the theoretical values, of which the R² is 0.87. A high-resolution radiation TB image is obtained, and the results show the TB characteristics of different objects well. The boundary of the ground object is closer to the real value after correction. Full article

A drone-borne microwave radiometer requires a high sampling frequency and a continuous acquisition capability to detect and mitigate radio frequency interference (RFI), but existing methods cannot store such a large amount of data. In this paper, the dual polling write method (DPSM) for secure digital cards triggered by a timer under a multitask framework based on STM32 MCU is proposed to meet the requirements of continuous data storage. The card programming step was changed from a query waiting structure to a polling query flag bit structure, and time-sharing processing and parallel processing were used to simulate multithreading. The experimental results were as follows: (1) the time consumption of the whole storage procedure was reduced from 4000 microseconds to 200–400 microseconds; (2) the time consumption of the card programming step was reduced from 3000 microseconds in the first block and 1000 microseconds in the second and subsequent blocks to 17–174 microseconds and 18–71 microseconds, respectively, compared with the existing method; (3) the delay in the whole sampling cycle was reduced from 3942 microseconds to 0 microseconds. The results of this paper can meet the data storage requirements of a drone-borne microwave radiometer and be applied to the high-speed storage of other devices. Full article