TruWeather develops low-altitude weather testbed for DFW area
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
A Virginia-based aviation-oriented weather company has begun testing its advanced low-altitude weather forecasting technology geared to helping pave the way for increased drone traffic and the launch of advanced air mobility (AAM) operations in the Dallas/Fort Worth region.
TruWeather Solutions, working in cooperation with real-estate development company Hillwood and its affiliates AllianceTexas and Fort Worth Alliance Airport, the city of Fort Worth and the North Central Texas Council of Governments, to develop an “urban weather testbed” to provide drone pilots in the region with hyper-local weather data.
The project will entail deploying more than 20 advanced weather and wind sensors across key locations throughout AllianceTexas, a mixed-use planned community which includes the fixed base operation (FBO) at Perot Field at Fort Worth Alliance Airport. The sensors will provide critical data on wind speeds and directions, particularly in the vicinity of area buildings.
“We are now running a model that can see the winds around the buildings,” TruWeather CEO Don Berchoff said in an interview. The team is using machine learning to analyze the data and to create a model that shows drone pilots how the presence of buildings can cause dramatic changes in the speed and direction of low-altitude winds.
Berchoff said the standard tools that manned aviation pilots use to analyze weather, such as the Meteorological Aerodrome Report (METAR), an international standard for reporting hourly surface weather observations at airports, are insufficient to provide the weather data needed by UAV pilots.
“The lack of weather data between METAR sites means that it’s unknowable. When you’re flying you can’t know what you’re flying in if you’re not with the aircraft,” he said. The FAA has now recognized this deficiency in its Precision Runway Monitor system (PRM). “If you look at the weather section, they now acknowledge that once you get five miles from the airport (METAR data) is not relevant and you are basically flying blind.”
Recognizing the need of UAV operators AAM pilots for accurate low-altitude weather data, the FAA is opening up the door to allow trusted and appropriate third-party weather services to provide that data, he said.
“Just think of us as a supplemental data service supplier,” Berchoff said.
“We are moving to a data-performance standard just like UTM [Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management] has in the rest of the industry,” he said. “So, we we’re unlocking all this great technology that before couldn’t break into the aviation system — through all the rules and through all the bureaucracy — and we’re now unlocking the weather.”
The TruWeather system shows pilots what the winds are doing at different atmospheric layers from ground level up to 900 feet. Currently available wind-speed data can have a high error rate, which can present significant problems for drone pilots. Berchoff said he has seen cases in which the actual low-level wind speeds were double the speeds that had been forecast.
“Every percentage point of wind error causes a loss of battery power,” he said. “You’re going into a headwind and you might have 20% less battery than you thought you had, even on a bright daylight day.”
Conversely, he said that 30% to 40% of drone deliveries that are canceled due to weather could have been flown safely if the operators had access to more accurate weather data.
“They’re being conservative and being safe. What we want to do is get better data, find more safely, generate more revenue and more reliability,” he said. “It’s going to be the same problem with air taxis. They’re very limited by power and the winds are going to be a major factor.”
Sensor system set to expand
TruWeather eventually plans to deploy 30 sensors in its DFW-area system, with the remaining deployments scheduled to be completed by October 1.
The company had proved out the concept of a weather testbed in Hampton, Virginia with a $6 million NASA grant. The DFW urban weather testbed project is being funded through a combination of sources, including a NASA Small Business Innovation Research Award and a $2 million U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) SMART Grant awarded to the city of Fort Worth.
“We’re using that grant money to prove out this concept of high-density data collections in Fort Worth,” Berchoff said. TruWeather is currently working on securing its phase-two grant, which would allow the company to expand its sensor array to cover a much larger area.
Berchoff credited TruWeather’s partner company, Metro Weather, whose advanced LiDAR technology was used in the development of Wind Guardian, a state-of-the-art low-altitude wind-sensing system that sits at the center of the testbed’s weather system.
He added that other vital partners in the DFW project include Hillwood, which provided sites for the project’s sensors and Alliance Airport. “Hillwood has been a great champion of this. Their real estate group has given us access to the airport and other properties,” he said. The testbed’s team has included other DFW-area companies, which Berchoff could not identify because of non-disclosure agreements.
“By partnering with TruWeather, we will go beyond enabling advanced air mobility,” Christopher Ash, president of Alliance Aviation Companies at Alliance Airport, said in a statement. “We’re helping define the standards and best practices to guide its nationwide growth, which will aid in the safe, reliable deployment of drone technology and autonomous trucking.”
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
