Tim Pruss UAS Blog

Diurnal temperature range is the temperature variation that occurs throughout daylight hours (from sunrise to sunset). They are patterns because, generally speaking, they are the same from day to day. Several factors can affect the temperature variations. The length of the day is an obvious one, if the sun is heating the area for a longer period of time then the ambient temperature will naturally continue to increase over time, increasing the temperature variation. Along the same vein as the day length is cloud coverage. The clouds prevent the sun from heating the earth as much during the day while also preventing heat from escaping during the night, decreasing the variation. Ambient humidity and proximity to bodies of water are a major way that solar heat is absorbed. Water serves as a very effective heat sink and is able to absorb a lot of solar radiation before increasing in temperature. Once it has absorbed a lot of heat, it will remain at a more consistent temperature because

Research To increase our understanding of our topic, we have set to create an annotated bibliography with scholarly sources pertaining to the topics of diurnal temperature patterns, remote sensing, removal of noise in thermal imagery, and applications of thermal imagery in UAVs (among other topics) The culmination of our research can be found here What did we do? This week is the first week that we got to fly the m600 system. Due to the extensive nature of our data collection procedure, we thought it prudent to have a smaller outing to sort out any problems before we committed to a full day (sunrise to sunset) of data collection. Our main goal was getting trained on the M600 and learning how to use the XT2 thermal sensor.  After ensuring that the team was capable of flying the m600 we set up a simple mission that captured the buildings and the gravel parking of the Purdue Wildlife Area. In order to fit a flight into a single battery life, we set the overlap of the imag

Description of Project: Our project is the capture and analysis of diurnal heat patterns using UAS data and GIS software. The project will consist of first collecting thermal images of an area over several intervals throughout the day. Then we will combine the images into a composite image for ease of viewing and perform analysis on the collected data as a whole. This process will be repeated for multiple different areas of land so that we may see and compare the effect of diurnal heat patterns on different types of structures and land masses. Challenges: There are numerous challenges with completing a project of even as relatively low scope as this one. First among them is scheduling dates and times that the entire group is able to meet up . Due to the nature of the data collection procedure and the need for the entire team to be present, it will be difficult to arrange a day where everyone is capable of being present for every flight since it will include flights throughout t