TRACER-RAVEN

The Repositionable Aerial Vane Environmental Network (RAVEN), a distributed sensing solution, uses a number of aerodynamically stabilized data acquisition units to concurrently collect data from a number of altitudes generating an atmospheric profile. RAVEN provides practical atmospheric profiling ability for the purpose of weather monitoring. In particular, it is greatly beneficial to have more data on the lower troposphere, where the majority of damaging weather occurs. By utilizing a tethered kite or balloon based profiling system with distributed or mobile sensors, a persistent system can be placed at altitudes well above towers while continuously collecting data. Each RAVEN unit is an aerodynamically stabilized body with sensors for temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and position. While the DAQ unit is pointing into the wind, the absolute orientation is read with a nine degrees of freedom (DoF) IMU, and the magnitude of the wind is read with a pitot probe. A GPS, already used to track the units’ position, provides a measurement of the DAQ unit velocity. The sensors, microcontroller, and radio are located in the nose, an attachment point is placed at the center of gravity, and an aerodynamic tail and batteries are located on the back. The attachment point fixes to a clamp, which can then be clamped to an arbitrary point on the tether depending on user requirements.

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