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Using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for autonomous cloud seeding to achieve a faster ,reliable and safe cloud seeding in UAE.


Description

Summary

Safety is a very important factor in procedures like cloud seeding, since traditional cloud seeding processes could require flying an airplane in a storm condition. In addition to that, sending an actual airplane requires a huge amount of maintenance cost such as pre-flight, post-flight, regular and annual maintenance. Moreover, the time factor is one of the fundamental and very important factors in the cloud seeding operation. If the pilot is delayed for the period of cloud formation and arrived after its formation the cloud seeding operation may not be successful. And with the presence of cumulus clouds we have a huge energy that is associated with them which can be dangerous sometimes .Furthermore, there are violent rising currents and there are also streams coming down and the aircraft should move away directly after the mission is done, if the pilot missed the time he may be in a dangers situation since the cloud formation process takes a very short period of time .Inserting unmanned aircraft systems could be a reliable solution to achieve a fast reliable and safe cloud seeding process .


Category of the action

Mitigation/Adaptation, Changing public attitudes about climate change


What actions do you propose?

Establishing a research center that is concerned with researchs related to developing unmanned ,fixed wing aircrafts for  cloud seeding applications in UAE. 


Who will take these actions?

National Center of Meteorology & Seismology (NCMS) in UAE should take control of the entire procedure.


Where will these actions be taken?

United Arab Emirates 


What are other key benefits?

An advanced unmanned fixed-wing aircraft will be provided with an imaging system that will send images in real time to a ground control station to process the images and detect the right kind of clouds to be seeded and to estimate the amount of seeding material  depending on the cloud size. Then, after analyzing the images the ground station will send commands in real time for the aircraft to start the seeding process.

 


What are the proposal’s costs?

Initially ,the total cost for operating and maintaining an amount of 10 fixed wing unmanned air vehicle is around 420,000$ for the first ten year of the project life. Which is much way less than the cost for operating and maintaining the traditional aircrafts for the same time period.

 

 


Time line


Related proposals


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