Second Week Report: Deliniating Flight Areas

Week of January 7

During this cold January week, our team focused on additional preparation for upcoming flights when the weather improves. Where as last week was generally a complete team effort to plan folder pathing, this week we all worked in smaller groups. Some people worked on preparing equipment such as practicing packing the C-Astral parachute and setting up our ground control GPS system, others worked on scheduling, document organization, and general flight planning. I headed up the two man team of myself and operations manager Kyle Sheehan to plan our operational zones and define the boundary of our test site. This job is critical to complete early as no flights can be completed without clearly defined areas of interest.

The Plan

In planning our flight areas, several things were determined to be particularly pertinent. First, we would develop an overall operation area that is very large and potentially a reach to expect that we will cover it all consistently at a very high temporal resolution. This is because it will be easier to shrink our operational area if need be and prioritize dynamic areas throughout the season versus areas that end up not being particularly interesting. It is easier to understand phenomena within an area we are examining and adjust our parameters based on phenomena than to discover phenomena outside of our operational area. We also wanted to make sure that the land cover types contained in our test area were heterogeneous so that we could see how events such as flooding may impact different landscape types. We also planned to breakdown our overall flight area into sections. These sections would be the areas that are actually flown on certain missions and are assigned to flight crews. These sections would be based on a few different factors such as landscape types, size, interesting features, and expected phenomena. There is overlap between sites to some degree, so that way higher resolution flights of a smaller area can be chosen versus a larger area courser spatial resolution operation if desired. We based flight area size on expected aircraft as well. This way our fixed wing platform can operate at its capability, providing us better spatial extent, versus flight areas designed for the multirotor that do not cover as much area. Some flight areas would not take into account factors such as proximity to the river (chance of flooding) or topography, but may take into account for covering as much forest as possible. Other flight areas may cover various landscape types (forest, grassland, urban, water, etc) but are focused in areas where phenomena such as flooding are expected, or follow a topographical gradient. By having a diversity in sections, we can adjust flight planning throughout the semester based on need while also ensuring consistency of data. We also needed the sections to have geospatially consistent boundaries. This is so repeatability can be guaranteed and to minimize ambiguity of how flight areas are defined. For that reason, Arcmap was chosen to produce polygon vector data to define the sections (Figure 1). This type of vector data can be exported directly into flight planning software so that the exact same area will be covered each flight across all platforms and sensors.

Figure 1: Using Arcmap to define flight areas

The Result

Our test area is defined in figure 2. The extent of the test area covers the entirety of the amphitheater park, as well as a portion of Davis Ferry park across the river. Some of the sides of the polygon that may seem random or exclusive to portions of forest are structured to avoid private property or roadways. Overall, the site covers several land classes that may be of interest and dynamic throughout the Winter and Spring.

Figure 2: Chosen test area contained within red polygon

 

Within this polygon, 14 individual flight areas were created (Figure 3). As is apparent, some of these areas are significantly smaller than others. That is because some missions are designed to create different data products, such as the smallest section that is designed to create 3D models of the amphitheater. All the sections, as well as the test site, utilize the WGS 84 Zone 16 projected coordinate system.  The sections were given 5 letter codes for identification. While these codes may complicate things at first because they may not  be as simple to remember, they may minimize confusion between similar sites if a longer description was used. The identification code descriptions are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 3: Flight sections

Figure 4: Descriptions for each flight section

Next Steps

Several more developments need to be completed before flights can be completed. Predominately, this is the creation and finalization of all the folder structure for both the research and class drive. Some preliminary fieldwork must also be completed to gather permanent ground control points, important features, and potential concerns for each flight section.