Fundamental turbulence measurement with unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper addresses the potential of using unamanned aerial vehicles for conducting fundamental research in the atmospheric boundary layer. A method of computing wind speed from a moving velocity sensor data is provided. The approach is demonstrated for both five-hole probes and hot-wire probes. Included in the procedure is an technique which was shown to provide an invertible, a posteriori calibration for hot-wire voltage data, demonstrated using data from a mid-afternoon flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a single-sensor hot-wire probe. Several bulk and small-scale characteristics from small, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle flights in the convective boundary layer are calculated, and show the potential for extracting a range of both large-scale and small-scale turbulence statistics.