The spring to early summer of central North America is often considered tornado season.  The United States of America is hit with more tornadoes each year than any other region of the world.  The US averages around 1,200 tornadoes annually with the bulk of them hitting Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.  When these tornadoes strike they carve widespread panic.  They indiscriminately destroy anything in their paths, wrecking havoc and destruction.  These tornadoes cause around 80 deaths, thousands of injuries, and billions of dollars in damages.

Meteorology is not a precise science, and the study of tornadoes is one of the areas that has proven to be the hardest to research.  A group of engineering students from Oklahoma State University have begun a program to design drones to help gather reliable data on tornadoes.  This is a multi university project including support from Virginia Tech, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Kentucky along with the students from OSU.  The program is being led by OSU Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Jamey Jacob and is being partially funded by the US Department of Defense, with the hopes a a future collaboration with the National Weather Center.

Storm chasers have come a long way in gathering information to help understand the working of tornadoes, but there is a lot of missed data.  Close to 70% of all tornado warnings are false alarms because understanding how, where, and when a tornado will strike is very unpredictable.  Using Doppler radar to help predict tornadoes is only partially accurate because it can measure the general atmosphere.  But what goes on inside of the tornado is mostly unknown and could be the key to understanding and predicting them.  Professor Jacob pointed out, “Whether there’s a magic key in there, in what would be present in meteorological or thermodynamic data, we don’t know yet simply because we don’t have those type of measurements.”

That is their hopes with this drone project.  To build a drone that can help them successfully gather data on the atmosphere inside of a tornado.  The device to collect the data, dropsondes, are cylinders covered with sensors that can be dropped into a tornado.  Once in the tornado the dropsondes remotely transfer atmospheric data.  But finding a way to get the cylinders into the center of a tornado is not only extremely hard, but dangerous.  Which is where drones come into play.  Drones can provide a way of dropping the dropsondes into a tornado without posing any risks to humans.

As of right now the teams are still in the design phase of the project as a very custom drone needs to be built.  There are drones that can handle adverse weather conditions, but a tornado presents the most extreme of extreme weather conditions.  The drone will need to be portable enough to be carried and launched from a flatbed truck.  It will need to fly in winds of 22mph, with gusts up to 28mph.  It will need a battery strong enough to support flight times of at least 4 hours at 5,000 feet.  And will also have to be equipped with a high definition camera and a way of carrying and releasing multiple dropsondes.

Once a usable design is reached, the next step would be to build a prototype to be manufactured for use by meteorologists and other weather service providers.  Professor Jacob estimates that the cost to build a prototype could be around $25,000-$100,000 which is average for a storm drone.  But the cost isn’t the real issue that could hold back the process.  It is regulations by the FAA that could put a damper in the research process.  The FAA has just recently begun to change the rules and regulations that govern commercial drone use.  Hopefully these adjustments will move in favor for storm research drones.