An Assessment of the Potential Weather Barriers of Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

Urban Air Mobility (UAM), a subset of advanced air mobility, is a concept that envisions safe, sustainable, affordable, and accessible air transportation for passenger mobility, cargo delivery, and emergency management within or traversing a metropolitan area. In recent years, several companies have designed and tested enabling elements of this concept, including; prototypes of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, operational concepts, and market studies to understand potential business models. While UAM may be enabled by the convergence of several factors, a number of barriers such as weather could present challenges to scaling operations.This research discusses the potential weather challenges for operations in adverse conditions.This report presents a comprehensive seasonal and diurnal climatology analysis using historical observations across anticipated operational altitudes (surface –5000 ft AGL) at ten metropolitan areas across the United States for the NASA  Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD).