Shaped by Weather: University of Oklahoma Research Fuels Uncrewed Aerial System Development, Innovation

NORMAN, Okla., May 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- On the day of the 2023 Rolling Fork tornado, researchers with the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High Impact Weather (CIWRO) and NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory, headquartered on the University of Oklahoma campus, piloted a small network of drones through increasingly hostile conditions. The nimble airborne devices collected data about the changing atmosphere and demonstrated that such a tool could be used to improve the prediction of violent tornadoes. These drones are part of a lineage of uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) developed at CIWRO that are changing the face of weather observations.

Tony Segales, Ph.D., has led the system's development since he began his doctoral work at OU in the fall 2017. The CopterSonde-3D, the culmination of his dissertation, is a patented design for a weather-sensing UAS that is now exclusively licensed with InterMet, the world's leading supplier of atmospheric sensors. The patent, awarded last year, is specifically for the front scoop design of the CopterSonde-3D, a weather sensor package equipped with temperature and humidity sensors arranged in a strategic way to avoid data contamination by sources of heat around the drone.

"We designed the CopterSonde to essentially be a weathervane: It points into the wind. That's the baseline feature from which all the other onboard weather-targeted features were designed," said Segales.

As the drone points into the wind, air flows through the intake and across the sensors. It's a tricky configuration to target the right performance window, and even trickier to continue building upon.

"Initially, we had an airframe design that was more symmetrical and easier to balance, but now we are betting on a more intricate drone design," said Segales. "When you change something, it changes the balance in flight characteristics. Overall, we are achieving a drone design shaped by weather and tailored to atmospheric studies."

Next-Generation Technology

Segales and his graduate students manage the CopterSonde's engineering, and Segales is the only UAS research engineer on the team.

The CopterSonde is one example of the research-to-industry pipeline created at the intersection of academia and government research at the cooperative institute. Segales's designs are immediately put to work in the field, where meteorologists like Tyler Bell, Ph.D., a co-inventor on the patent, test new designs while also collecting weather data for their own meteorological research.

During the design process, the CopterSonde-3D underwent over 1,700 flights in various environments, such as extreme storm conditions in the southeastern United States, high altitudes in Colorado and the salty air of coastal Houston, Texas. Those flights, conducted by CIWRO's researchers and OU students, gave the meteorologists data to study the lower atmosphere and Segales the feedback from meteorologists he needed to return to his lab and redesign components of the UAS.

The CopterSonde-3D is a next-generation observational platform. The team hopes it can supplement existing measurements of the atmosphere and fill gaps that have been known for over a decade.

"Typically, we get weather balloon launches by the National Weather Service twice a day," said Bell. "But the rate at which the lowest part of the atmosphere changes is much higher than those twice-a-day launches, and we don't get much information in between. That lowest one or two miles of the atmosphere is where we live, and it's the part that influences a lot of high-impact weather."

The primary purpose of the CopterSondes is to fill existing time and geographical data gaps, but it also opens the door to significant research questions previously unexplored. Because UAS pilots can position the drone exactly where they want data from the lower atmosphere, the drones can venture into scenarios otherwise dangerous or impossible for humans to approach such as wildfires and severe storms.

Bell says the future development of the program will enable CopterSondes to fly autonomously and be placed at Mesonet stations across the country, creating a 3D Mesonet system.

"The UAS would work in combination with other sensors. A forecaster could select an area where they wanted more observations, and the drones would collect that data the forecaster needs in the moment," said Bell. He believes the CIWRO team will have a prototype developed for testing within a few years.

Game-Changing Collaborations

In collaboration with NSSL, the team is currently working to design a drone that can operate in the type of extreme environments forecasters might want to sample.

"On the engineering side of things, this represents a big challenge. The drone would have to max out during every flight, which puts more stress on the electronics," said Segales. "We want to measure the limits of the performance of these drones on extreme events to see how much we can really push the systems for sustained amounts of time."

These collaborations between engineers and meteorologists, cooperative institute researchers and government scientists, create an environment where a product like the CopterSonde can blossom from an idea into a device that can provide life-saving benefits for the American public.

"There is this great feedback loop that we have here, where we can do this research from the ground up, from basic design to the actual application of science and innovation," said Bell.

An example comes from what Bell calls one of the more impactful datasets they've captured: a central Oklahoma winter weather precipitation event in 2019. The CopterSonde-3D showed that the precipitation was changing by the minute, alternating among sleet, ice, rain, and freezing rain.

"That's an example of how we can improve forecasts using this data, because in those conditions half a degree matters, and the Copter can get that half a degree really, really well," said Bell.

In the future, Segales envisions a fleet of CopterSondes, each specifically designed for specific extreme events – drones built to handle icing on blades, and others made to soar through high winds and examine hurricanes from within. For now, there's a patent pending for another member of the CopterSonde family, and the potential for next-generation weather and safety through these important academic and federal partnerships.

About the University of Oklahoma 
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state's flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information about the university, visit www.ou.edu.

SOURCE University of Oklahoma