Design and Preliminary Experiment of HALE UAV Podded Dropsonde System

As the rapid development of high altitude long endurance UAV (HALE UAV) technology in China, it’s possible for China to carry out the offshore typhoon observation by HALE UAV with meteorological observing instruments installed on board. A new remotely controlled dropsonde system based on a certain type of HALE UAV has been designed and developed by Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration(CMA MOC), in collaboration of AVIC Chengdu Aircraft Industrial (Group) Co. Ltd (AVIC CAC) and Beijing Institute of Radio Measurement(BIRM).This podded dropsonde system is capable of carrying up to 48 dropsondes and can support four simultaneous soundings provide in-situ atmospheric profiles of temperature, humidity, pressure, wind direction and wind speed data. Dynamic simulation test results show that, HALE UAV equipped with this dropsonde system can subsequently deploy the dropsondes from altitudes up to 12km safely and steadily. The prototype of the podded dropsonde system has already been equipped on the Medium altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle system (MALE UAV), and carried out dropsonde observation for several times. According to the comparison and analysis of dropsonde data with the near collocated operational balloon radiosonde data shows that the real-time dropsonde data quality is reliable and stable. Further research can be executed on the offshore dropsonde observing experiment with the podded dropsonde system equipped on the HALE UAV to understand the characteristic of typhoon internal fine-scale structure by studying the real-time profile s, to improve the operational TC track and intensity predictions.