Solar, high-altitude, long-endurance UAVs have the potential to make weather-related measurements that may help scientists and meteorologists gain more accurate observations of the Earth. Comparisons were made between current low orbit weather satellites and a notional solar, high-altitude, long-endurance UAV to compliment the geostationary equatorial orbit weather satellites. UAVs for weather operations may better compliment, rather than replace, weather satellites due to the difficulty of providing global coverage with reasonable amount of UAVs and revisit time. The solar, high-altitude, long-endurance UAVs may further assist the Polar Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) systems in the areas of calibrating sounding instruments aboard the POES. The solar, high-altitude, long-endurance platform has the opportunity to validate radiosonde data and find biases to improve the data when they are available, provide independent in-situ observations as independent datasets between 19.8-30.5 km (65,000-100,000 ft). These datasets may be useful as assimilation inputs for weather forecast models to improve weather forecast and also validating satellite temperature and moisture retrievals when satellites are available.
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