PEMDAS APPLICATIONS & SYSTEMS
Applications and Advanced Technology for Environmental Analysis.
ASAPS HARDWARE SYSTEM
PEMDAS has developed one of the world’s most reliable and accurate airborne weather sensor systems, the Atmospheric Sensing & Prediction System (ASAPS).
The PEMDAS developed Atmospheric Sensing and Prediction System (ASAPS®) is an airborne sensor designed to collect real-time in situ atmospheric data for generation of adverse weather warnings. Originally designed for and proven by the U.S. military’s Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), PEMDAS ASAPS has been enhanced to operate on commercial drones as well as general aviation aircraft such as the Beech King Air.
ASAPS collects and processes real-time atmospheric data into the PEMDAS Environmental Intelligence (EI) system for two primary purposes:
- Provide early warning to aircraft operators of impending inflight weather threats such as icing and clouds.
- Generating real-time, high fidelity decision products such as icing and cloud layers, wind profiles, and cloud-free line-of-sight views. This allows for improved flight planning, in-flight maneuvering, and intelligent decision tools such as real-time navigational re-routing.
Example: The ASAPS sensor supported aerial surveys of the Feather River downstream of the Oroville Dam in Northern California when heavy rainfall and erosion led to concerns the dam would fail and the entire lake would flood the river valley.
The PEMDAS Atmospheric Sensing and Prediction System (ASAPS) was critical to aerial surveillance of the damage, the assessment and initiation of repairs of the dam, and coordinating the evacuation of nearly 180,000 people living downstream. The ASAPS system was used to predict poor environmental conditions for airborne assets, helping ensure that Electro-Optical and Infrared sensors were not damaged by icing or other adverse weather conditions.
INTELLIGENT DATA SOLUTIONS
Environmental Knowledge
PEMDAS has delivered one of the world’s most reliable and accurate environmental intelligence systems.
While other systems use weather information that is often hours old, PEMDAS’ unique approach fuses timely and relevant environmental information from authoritative sources with advanced algorithms to rapidly process that data. The result is improved, real-time assessments of the environment in specific areas of interest, from entire countries to particular neighborhoods.
These real-time assessments are exploited to provide customized decision aids that provide users with relevant and timely information needed to ensure resource protection and mission accomplishment.
Customizable Visualizations
PEMDAS has developed Skylight, a start-of-the-art visualization system for rendering environmental intelligence. PEMDAS visualizations include observations like satellite and radar, plus lightning strike information available within seconds of occurrence, as well as hazard forecast overlays. Visualizations use real-time georeferencing which allows users to see not just predicted hazards, but also their own location relative to the environmental threats.
Flight Management Tools
While flights are often planned with environmental threats in mind, reacting and responding to those environmental threats during a flight can consume valuable time and detract from mission execution. To address this, PEMDAS has developed a suite of machine-to-machine tools that integrate with autonomous flight operations to automatically adapt to observed and forecast environmental threats. These tools include adjustment of loiter time and fuel consumption based on in situ and predicted atmospheric winds along the flight route, and integration with mission planning and navigation software to ensure avoidance of environmental threats. Based on the PEMDAS EI system, these tools are automatically updated with each new high-fidelity environmental threat prediction package, and downlinked to mission planning and execution tools.
