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Chapter II
Technological Potential of Unmanned
Aircraft for Global Change studies

Dr. John S. Langford
Aurora Flight Sciences

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Introduction 

The preceding sections make it clear that a wide range of scientific questions must be addressed in formulating public policy for global change. An underlying premise of this chapter is that carefully defined science questions should determine the measurements, measurements should define the instruments, and the instruments and measurements together should define the platform. It is this chain of logic that has led us to the conclusion that the nation's global climate change research program could strongly benefit from, and to some extent requires, the use of unmanned aircraft. This role is by no means exclusive: the unmanned aircraft are complementary to, rather than competitive with, space- and ground-based observation systems. In this chapter we review the case for the unmanned aircraft and present a first draft of a comprehensive, ten-year national program.
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