Award Data

Development of a reflection control and direction device (RCDD) is proposed. This innovative device will progress the state of the art for propulsion of solar sails used to fly space weather monitoring sensors to sub-LaGrange point orbits for earlier warning times of impending destructive space weather events. A reflection control device (RCD) utilizes polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) mater ...

Drought is responsible for $327.7B in economic loss since 1980 in the United States and typically precedes, cooccurs, or initiates other hazards like wildfires or prolonged periods of intense heat. The compounding or cascading of these hazards routinely threatens the wellbeing and stability of communities. The economic impact from drought can be especially harsh when the drought begins rapidly in ...

Temperature is the critical signal that allows monitoring of a myriad of Earth’s processes. From direct measurements of wildfire and urban heat to more complex relationships with drought, agriculture, aquaculture, and biodiversity, maintaining a steady pulse on Earth’s surface temperature enables us to mitigate for and adapt to the impacts of extreme events and increasingly variable water avai ...

The brevetoxins (PbTx) produced by Karenia brevis cause harmful algal blooms (HAB) or "red tide" in seawater. Currently, the only available ways of detecting PbTx are laboratory tests such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays, which are expensive and slow, and require complex instrumentation and multiple processing steps. In previous work Intelligent Optical Systems (IOS) demonstrated a compact l ...

"Jaia Robotics’ low-cost, micro-sized hybrid uncrewed surface/underwater vehicles called JaiaBotsTM can be deployed from the shore or vessels. The system enables truly affordable multivehicle operations that can be scaled to provide wide area synoptic data collection. In the proposed effort the project team will develop a JaiaBot which is air-deployable from sonobuoy launch tubes to collect atmo ...

A cloud based system for sharing bathymetric survey data collected by FarSounder customers is proposed as a way(1) to improve safety of navigation on our oceans, (2) to collect measurements for the broader scientific and maritime communities and (3) to generally explore and broadly share information about our oceans in fulfillment of ideas proposed in Topic 9.3 “The Changing Ocean”, and in acc ...

Low level meteorological data over the world’s oceans is hard to collect, due to the cost and difficulty of sensor emplacement. Crewed aircraft are deployed when major weather events arise, but between those major weather events, in-situ data sources are very limited. Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) present a unique opportunity to inexpensively collect meteorological data from remote areas, but ...

Prescribed burns are a critical aspect of land management, but they require vegetation data that is hard to obtain at high resolution and on the timescale required. Our autonomous UAV collects critical fire modeling variables through subcanopy flight, enabling rapid surveys for faster and safer burn planning. In Phase I, we proved the feasibility of mapping live fuel moisture content (LFMC) with s ...

Tropical Cyclone meteorological data from the Atlantic main development region (MDR) is difficult to collect due to the remoteness of the location and difficulty of deploying manned aircraft to the region. Data collection is frequent upon development of a major hurricane but many tropical disturbances in the MDR leading up to hurricane development are of interest. Being able to collect meteorologi ...

Wildfire response planning is limited by the lack of high-resolution data for use in wildfire prediction. Wildfire models depend on many variables, including weather, topography, vegetation type and arrangement, fuel moisture content, and regional fire prevention measures, among others. Some of these variables are static or nearly so, but some of these are highly dynamic. In particular, live fuel ...