Elaboração de um Sistema para Medições do Perfil Vertical Atmosférico na Camada de Superfície com o Uso de Instrumentação de Baixo Custo Embarcada em Drone

Abstract

Atmospheric natural disasters can have their damage mitigated if meteorological alerts are disseminated in a timely manner and if such phenomena are precisely and accurately represented. Among the possible ways to obtain data related to weather conditions are the use of atmospheric profilers and numerical models, among which is the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Such resources can be used, among other possible applications, for studies related to the surface layer, which is subjected to substantial variations in its temperature, humidity, and wind values as a function of height due to frictional drag, heat conduction and evaporation near to the surface, so this layer of the lower troposphere plays an important role in many human relationships. In order to make atmospheric experiments achievable, without the need for large financial outlays, a low-cost atmospheric profiler was developed together with the Laboratory for Monitoring and Numerical Modeling of Climate Systems (LAMMOC) at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) to be aboard a drone and based on prototyping with Arduino, which had as sensors the DHT22 for measuring temperature and relative humidity, the BMP280 for measuring atmospheric pressure, and the MPX5100DP for treating the influence of the descending air of the drone's propellers on the measurements. Thus, this profiler was used in an experiment, from which atmospheric vertical profiles were generated. The WRF model associated with the WRF-Python routines package was also used to generate profiles of atmospheric variables for comparative analysis with the observed data. As a result, it was noticed that the observed data profiles described a behavior of the surface layer that indicates the occurrence of thermal inversion and change of regime of this layer. Therefore, it is evaluated that the methodology of using this profiler can be applied in several atmospheric studies, such as atmospheric pollution and nowcasting weather forecast, as well as its potential for use in areas such as operational meteorology and assimilation of data from numerical models shows to be promising.