University of Nebraska unmanned aerial system (UAS) profiling during the LAPSE-RATE field campaign

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes the data collected by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) as part of the field deployments during the Lower Atmospheric Process Studies at Elevation – a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE) flight campaign in July 2018. The UNL deployed two multirotor unmanned aerial systems (UASs) at multiple sites in the San Luis Valley (Colorado, USA) for data collection to support three science missions: convection initiation, boundary layer transition, and cold air drainage flow. We conducted 172 flights resulting in over 21 h of cumulative flight time. Our novel design for the sensor housing onboard the UAS was employed in these flights to meet the aspiration and shielding requirements of the temperature and humidity sensors and to separate them from the mixed turbulent airflow from the propellers. Data presented in this paper include timestamped temperature and humidity data collected from the sensors, along with the three-dimensional position and velocity of the UAS. Data are quality-controlled and time-synchronized using a zero-order-hold interpolation without additional post-processing. The full dataset is also made available for download at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4306086 (Islam et al., 2020).