An Early Look at the Development of an Unmanned Automated Surface Aviation Weather Observation System

Abstract

A review of an effort to develop an Aviation Automated Weather Observation System (AV-AWOS) for unmanned locations is given. The essential difference between AV-AWOS and currently existing automatic systems will he its capability to report sky condition and visibility. The reason for the development is presented along with a description of the initial configuration of sensors being tested. Some early visibility results are shown. Some of the results hoped for are improvements in the timeliness of providing information on significant weather changes and in the repeatability of the observations.