Buried sensors connected to tripods monitor soil moisture and how much heat from the Sun is being absorbed into the ground. In the space between the towers and the ground sensors, various lidar instruments use laser beams to profile wind, water vapor, and temperature. A large Doppler weather radar called S-Pol scans the atmosphere – rotating back and forth, stopping short of a full 360° rotation to provide a slice of airspace for a flock of weather drones to fly uninhibited.
Many of these instruments are part of a prototype demonstration from scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) for a proposed sensor network called the LOwer Troposphere Observing System (LOTOS). LOTOS – pronounced like the Lotus flower – aims to improve observations of the troposphere, the lowest region of Earth's atmosphere, by simultaneously sampling the atmosphere horizontally and vertically.
LOTOS is envisioned to help improve high-impact weather forecasting for events like thunderstorms, high winds, heavy rainfall, hail, floods, and winter storms.“The troposphere is the most important part of the atmosphere because that's where everybody lives,” said Tammy Weckwerth, NSF NCAR scientist. “There's not one instrument or even a few instruments that are capable of giving us all the measurements that are really going to be useful to help us better understand atmospheric processes and make forecasts. The LOTOS network will allow for new studies and discoveries.”
Since no single instrument can collect all the atmospheric measurements scientists need, research teams currently cobble together observations from the conglomeration of instruments they can find to try and reconstruct the current state of the atmosphere. This can include balloon launches from one location and radar observations from another, along with observations from passenger planes overhead and airport weather stations on the ground.
LOTOS would not replace these means of collecting data, but it would provide a more unified and coordinated way to use multiple instruments at one location to give scientists a detailed new tool for understanding the atmosphere.
