Development of a complex dynamical modeling system for the meteorological support of unmanned aerial operation in Hungary

Proper, detailed and specific meteorological information is essential in aviation meteorology and may be especially critical in unmanned aerial operations. The aim of the research partially described in the present paper is the development of a weather prediction system that is suitable for the above purpose. The dynamical modeling component of the system was tailored and tested for the special needs of aviation weather forecasting for unmanned aerial operations in the Carpathian basin. Following an extensive technical implementation, the so-called Weather Research and Forecasting limited area model has been applied for this purpose. The applicability of the model system have been investigated on 9 typical weather situations, all of them having aeronautical safety relevance from the weather hazard point of view, all of the selected test case type weather situations are having significant influence on the weather of Hungary. The fine tuning of the model setup included parallel run of 30 different setup model versions, as ensemble members, each of them having different combination of parameterization. Verification of the ensemble members against observation yielded the optimal model version for the present purpose. Furthermore, meteorological measurements with sensors installed on UAV platform have been done. Following the short introduction of the weather prediction system that was applied, results of the case study test runs are compared to observation. The experiences of the first UAV flights are also presented. Results are introduced and the directions towards further development are described.