Design and field campaign validation of a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle and optical particle counter

Girdwood, Joseph; Smith, Helen; Stanley, Warren; Ulanowski, Zbigniew; Stopford, Chris; Chemel, Charles; Doulgeris, Konstantinos-Matthaios; Brus, David; Campbell, David; Mackenzie, Robert

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6613-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6613-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-6613-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

Research article

|

07 Dec 2020

Research article |

| 07 Dec 2020

Design and field campaign validation of a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle and optical particle counter

Joseph Girdwood, Helen Smith, Warren Stanley, Zbigniew Ulanowski, Chris Stopford, Charles Chemel, Konstantinos-Matthaios Doulgeris, David Brus, David Campbell, and Robert Mackenzie

Data sets

UHAeroSAM-CFTLPT J. Girdwood https://doi.org/10.17632/7by3d28hxf.1

PaCE-2019-UHAeroSAM-CAPS J. Girdwood https://doi.org/10.17632/htbxftpc9h.1

AeroSAM-Analysis JGirdwood https://github.com/JGirdwood/AeroSAM-Analysis

Short summary

We present the design and validation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a bespoke optical particle counter (OPC). This is used to monitor atmospheric particles, which have significant effects on our weather and climate. These effects are hard to characterise properly, partly because they occur in regions that are not commonly accessible to traditional instrumentation. Our new platform gives us the capability to access these regions.