The Oklahoma 3D Mesonet is a first-of-its-kind atmospheric observing system that represents a significant leap forward in weather monitoring. It integrates uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) with the Oklahoma Mesonet ground network to capture real-time, three-dimensional atmospheric data. Since December 2025, scientists from the Oklahoma Mesonet, the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO), and the University of Oklahoma (OU) School of Meteorology have been conducting quasi-operational UAS flights at the Washington, Oklahoma Mesonet station, located within OU’s Kessler Atmospheric and Ecological Field Station (KAEFS), as part of the National Mesonet Program (NMP). That site now also hosts flights from NMP partner Meteomatics, expanding the depth and reach of this observing capability.
About the Oklahoma Mesonet
The Oklahoma Mesonet is a world-class network of environmental monitoring stations. The network was designed and implemented by scientists at the University of Oklahoma and at Oklahoma State University. Commissioned on January 1, 1994, the Mesonet consists of 120 automated stations covering Oklahoma. There is at least one Mesonet station in each of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.
At each site, the environment is measured by a set of instruments located on or near a 10-meter-tall tower. The measurements are packaged into “observations” every 5 minutes, then the observations are transmitted to a central facility every 5 minutes, 24 hours per day, year-round. The Oklahoma Climatological Survey at the University of Oklahoma receives the observations, verifies the quality of the data and provides the data to Mesonet customers. It only takes 5 to 10 minutes from the time the measurements are acquired until they become available to the public.
About the National Mesonet
Led by Prime Contractor, KBR, and Lead Subcontractor, Synoptic Data PBC, the National Mesonet is the central repository for real-time collection and dissemination of non-federal surface, boundary layer and tropospheric atmospheric weather observations in the US. These observations substantially augment the nation’s backbone of monitoring infrastructure and significantly improve weather prediction, severe weather warnings, and emergency response for all regions of the country. Data from the National Mesonet also serves as a critical resource to aid business leaders, policy makers, and researchers in key decision making that affect every segment of the US economy including the highly weather-sensitive security, transportation, and energy sectors.
About Synoptic Data
Synoptic Data is building the largest, global real-time environmental data platform, empowering users with timely and accurate information to aid in decision making. As the Lead Subcontractor of the National Mesonet Program, Synoptic handles the data aggregation, quality control, and dissemination to the National Weather Service (NWS), enabling the seamless flow of essential weather data that bolsters the NWS’s mission to protect life, property, and the economy.
About the Commercial Observations Program
The National Weather Service (NWS) Commercial Observations Program (COP) is providing the key enabling programmatic and organizational construct for modernizing and transforming a number of NWS federal observing systems, across a variety of observing systems types and domains. In response to Administration and Congressional priorities, the COP will expand and procure commercially available data from a wide variety of sources to support the NWS public safety, forecast and warning mission, and the missions of our partners.
The science is clear that more frequent and denser horizontal coverage of vertical profiles are key to improving the skill of our numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems, to enhance and improve the skill of forecast and warnings in support of the NWS public safety mission. During the last few years, there has been explosive growth in commercial data in the “upper air” domain. Private companies are operating observing networks analogous to the NWS balloon network, providing lower cost data at much greater frequency and spatial density. Beyond balloons, there are other cutting edge technologies that may provide vertical profile data, and UAS have emerged as a key, cost effective and high value observing system and dataset. In NWS, efforts will be made to maintain the historic 92-station federal network, but any growth beyond that will utilize commercial partnerships and data sources via the COP, and UAS networks will be a key component of an integrated, optimized upper air network leveraging “beyond balloons” technologies.
Within the COP, state mesonets will serve as a key partner in effectuating nationwide coverage for UAS, via a federated business model. State mesonets may own and operate drones from various manufacturers, such as the CopterSonde, or they may serve as hosts for operations by private UAS operators, such as Meteomatics. The new UAS effort at KAEFS will pilot the various UAS technologies to optimize operations around frequency and depth of vertical profiles, and refine the federated business model. With Administration and Congressional support, the COP will partner with state mesonets around the country to grow out the capability nationwide, and concurrently work to integrate the data in NWS operational forecast and warning systems and its public safety mission.
About CIWRO and CopterSonde
The Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO) bridges partnerships between the University of Oklahoma (OU), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and consortium institutions to transform scientific understanding into products that provide innovative, life-saving forecasts that reduce the impacts of extreme weather on communities and ecosystems.
CIWRO develops the CopterSonde, a lineage of weather observation drones. Designed to fly in a wide range of atmospheric conditions, the CopterSondes aim to fill existing time and geographical data gaps in upper-air observations. Because UAS pilots can position CopterSondes exactly where they want data from the lower atmosphere, the drones can venture into scenarios otherwise dangerous or impossible for humans to approach such as wildfires and severe storms. The latest design, known as the CopterSonde-SWX, is being used in weekly flights at KAEFS.
About Meteomatics
Meteomatics Meteodrones are fully operational, commercially deployed systems, regularly collecting weather data across Europe and North America. Each flight delivers a high-resolution vertical profile of wind, temperature, humidity, and pressure — the same type of data that NWS balloons have provided twice daily for decades, but available on demand, at far greater frequency, and without consumables or manual launches. The key to that scalability is the Meteobase: a drone-in-a-box ground station that enables fully automated, remote operations. A Meteobase can receive a remote command to launch a Meteodrone, collect a vertical profile up to 20,000 feet, and return the aircraft — all without a human on site. These denser and more frequent observations lead to more confident forecasts, which translate into more timely warnings and fewer disruptions for transportation, utilities, agriculture, and emergency management.