[Wrf-users] notice of May AGU/Joint assembly session

[Jeff Tilley]

Dear Colleagues:

Attached you will find the session description for a planned Special  
Session at the upcoming AGU/Joint Assembly meeting to be held May  
26-30 in Ft. Lauderdale.
Deadline for abstracts is 2359 UTC 5 March 2008.

Please feel free to pass this notice on to any of your colleagues who  
may be interested.  Questions may be directed to me via email or phone  
contact information given in the signature to this message.

Cheers
Jeff Tilley
University of North Dakota

-----------------------------------------
AGU
2008 Joint Assembly
Ft. Lauderdale, FL, May 26-30

Session A07

Convenors:  Jeffrey S. Tilley* and Mark Askelson, University of North  
Dakota

Index Terms:  3394 (Instruments and Techniques) 3307 (Boundary Layer  
Processes)
                         3360 (Remote Sensing); 3329 (Mesoscale  
Meteorology); 3315 (Data assimilation)

Session Title: Atmospheric Applications of Unmanned Airborne Vehicles  
and Associated Technologies

In recent years, technologies related to remotely-piloted unmanned  
airborne vehicles (UAVs) have advanced rapidly, allowing for numerous  
military, homeland security and civilian applications to emerge.   
Included in these applications are homeland surveillance and border  
patrol functions; it is envisioned that over the next two decades, a  
fleet of UAVs could be routinely utilized within current civilian  
airspace for these functions.   As atmospheric instrumentation and UAV  
technologies become more sophisticated over time, there are clear  
possibilities for jointly utilizing such platforms not only to fulfill  
such security functions, but also as mobile atmospheric observing  
platforms, providing a wealth of quality in-situ data that has, in  
recent years, been most closely approximated by the limited TAMDAR  
program.  Such data have clear implications for improving our basic  
understanding and numerical modeling/prediction of many atmospheric  
processes in the lower troposphere and boundary layer.

Before widespread UAV deployment can be conceived, however,  
technologies need to be in place to provide sense-and-avoid  
capabilities within the national airspace system, such that in-flight  
collisions with other aircraft types, as well as unfavorable flying  
conditions, are avoided.  Such technologies, including the use of  
ganged phased-array radar systems (GPARs), are currently under  
investigation at several institutions; if utilized properly, these  
technologies could themselves be used to provide additional remotely- 
sensed data streams depicting boundary-layer and lower tropospheric  
flows and processes (especially convection) with high fidelity over…at  
a minimum…the meso-gamma and micro-alpha scales.

The aim of this session is to focus on recent and current work towards  
the utilization of not only UAV observations, but also associated  
technologies (such as a GPARs), for atmospheric applications.   
Possible areas for contributions, include, but are not limited to:  
recent field studies utilizing UAV systems, phased-array radar system  
design, development and applications, as well as applications of UAV- 
derived data to theoretical, modeling, and data assimilation  
studies.   Papers examining the potential future integration of data  
from a wide network of active UAV platforms into the current  
operational observing network are also welcome.   We hope to entrain a  
wide network of interested parties across the atmospheric sciences to  
allow for a comprehensive information exchange as well as promotion of  
ideas for continued rapid development of technologies that have an  
exciting potential for the atmospheric sciences.

---------------------------------
Dr. Jeff Tilley                                                         
email: tilley at rwic.und.edu
University of North Dakota                                Ph:  
701-777-4303
Regional Weather Information Center              Fax: 701-777-3888
3980 Campus Road Stop 9007                        Cell: 218-791-2696
Grand Forks, ND 58202-9007
http://www.rwic.und.edu/~tilley



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucar.edu/pipermail/wrf-users/attachments/20080220/c28764dc/attachment.html