Specially-Equipped Dehavilland Twin Otter UV-18a Aircraft Utilized
As the recent Monterey county wildfires burned more than 150,000 acres, Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) researchers took to the local skies in a specially-equipped DeHavilland Twin Otter UV-18A aircraft, basically a flying laboratory full of scientific instruments, to research the effects that smoke has on the atmosphere to help better understand how smoke can affect optical and infrared sensor performance, and to test how well Navy aerosol models do in predicting smoke conditions. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, NPS’ aerial researchers from the Department of Meteorology’s Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) and Airborne R