Abstract

Concentrations of airborne chemical and biological agents from a hazardous release are not spread uniformly. Instead, there are regions of higher concentration, in part due to local atmospheric flow conditions which can attract agents. We equipped a ground station and two rotary-wing unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) with ultrasonic anemometers. Flights reported here were conducted 10 to 15 m above ground level (AGL) at the Leach Airfield in the San Luis Valley, Colorado as part of the Lower Atmospheric Process Studies at Elevation—a Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE) campaign in 2018. The ultrasonic anemometers were used to collect simultaneous measurements of wind speed, wind direction, and temperature in a fixed triangle pattern; each sensor was located at one apex of a triangle with ∼100 to 200 m on each side, depending on the experiment. A WRF-LES model was used to determine the wind field across the sampling domain. Data from the ground-based sensors and the two UASs were used to detect attracting regions (also known as Lagrangian Coherent Structures, or LCSs), which have the potential to transport high concentrations of agents. This unique framework for detection of high concentration regions is based on estimates of the horizontal wind gradient tensor. To our knowledge, our work represents the first direct measurement of an LCS indicator in the atmosphere using a team of sensors. Our ultimate goal is to use environmental data from swarms of sensors to drive transport models of hazardous agents that can lead to real-time proper decisions regarding rapid emergency responses. The integration of real-time data from unmanned assets, advanced mathematical techniques for transport analysis, and predictive models can help assist in emergency response decisions in the future.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-15-2018

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Sensors, v. 18, issue 12, 4448, p. 1-20.

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124448

Funding Information

This research was supported in part by grants from the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS) at Virginia Tech, the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant number AGS 1520825 (Hazards SEES: Advanced Lagrangian Methods for Prediction, Mitigation and Response to Environmental Flow Hazards) and DMS 1821145 (Data-Driven Computation of Lagrangian Transport Structure in Realistic Flows). Limited travel support for LAPSE-RATE participants was provided by the National Science Foundation (AGS 1807199) and the US Department of Energy (DE-SC0018985).

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