Awra

Welcome to the AWRA project, creation of an Adverse Weather Research Aircraft designed to gather atmospheric data on some of the most extreme weather conditions generated by our planet.

The AWRA system has been designed and manufactured by students from the University of Southampton, UK. This work has been carried out as a final year group design project, in partial fulfilment of the Masters of Engineering Aeronautics and Astronautics Degree Programme.

This project seeks to prove the concept of using a novel unmanned aerial vehicle capable of enduring severe weather to gather data on hard to forecast weather phenomena such as tornados. Such phenomena currently present a significant observational challenge due to difficulty placing sensors in the right airspace at the right time during harsh and unpredictable weather conditions.

The UAV is designed to be used as a carrier, capable of flying within close proximity of the rapid surrounding winds, after which sensor payloads will be released into the weather system. These custom made sensor packages will gather temperature, humidity, pressure and positional data which will be analysed post flight to produce a 3D pressure-temperature-humidity model.

This project forms one part of an international collaboration with students at the University of Missouri Kansas City, US.
The US team are responsible for producing a Remotely Operated Ground Vehicle which will be used to transport the UK Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to a suitable severe weather investigation launch location. The UAV will also be launched from the ground platform.

The project has received industrial sponsorship, and test flights in the US are set to take part in early May 2017.

To find out more about Engineering at the University of Southampton please visit http://www. southampton. ac. uk /engineering /index. page