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John Dickow: [00:00:00] hello. Welcome to another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John Decker with the drone launch Academy here to find the answers to your drone questions. The ones that you submit. And today's drone question is how can drones be used?

To survey storm damage. This is a really cool one. I'm excited to talk about this one. I have with me today, Lou Rue, he's retired fire police, Lieutenant. Also a storm chaser, he's a sky Warren coordinator with the national weather service. Lou, thank you for joining me today.

it's a really cool thing you do. I, whenever I think of storm chasing, I think of twister. It sounds exciting. It sounds dangerous. Now, I know you're probably not. driving behind tornadoes, maybe, uh, the same way they did, but I wanted you to talk a little bit about what you do and how you, got into using drones.

Lou Rue: I've been chasing storms for, 20 years now. Um, and back then there was no drones. In fact, when I first started it, there was, Not even really any good cell phone coverage. it's something that I've picked up over the years. along with all the storm [00:01:00] chasing, I actually got a very good relationship with the National Weather Service.

Lou: And one of the things they do is when they are, surveying storm damage, Mostly it's for tornadoes you know, if a tornado comes through or they think a tornado came through, and they want to, figure out what happened, they will go out and they will do a damage survey, which actually, involves them going out and, looking at the damage that occurred.

one of the things they're looking for when they do the damage survey is to find out the path length, path width. what exactly got hit? you know, some of the stuff that gets hit is in an area that they can't get to because it's heavily wooded, et cetera, et cetera. they do their best with what they can do if they really think they need an aerial survey, they will actually dispatch the civil air patrol to come out to go out and fly over, but that takes time and one of the things with a damage survey.

It's really a forensics thing. So you want to, get your, information as quickly as possible before it gets contaminated. I was talking to John about where I live, there's big Amish communities, and if [00:02:00] a building gets hit, by a tornado, and you go out the next day and want to look at the damage, the damage is already halfway fixed.

So it's real hard to do new damage surveys in a lot of cases. So you want to get out there quick You want to get out there quick and you want to get you the information before it gets fixed basically,

John Dickow: so, Lou, that kind of leads to where the drone comes in. I mean, it sounds like a major advantage when you want to get up in the air quickly and see this damage as soon as you can after the storm passes. If I

Lou: can get there with my drone and I am in an area where I need to see more than I can by walking around or driving around on the, ground level, getting that drone up is, is really good, in getting a, little bit bigger picture of it. one of the things the Weather Service is looking for when they do these surveys is path length, path width, and when, from ground level, it's almost impossible to figure that out, uh, honestly, they, basically guess it based on what damage.

points they've looked at. They call them, you know, damage points, and they, they make their [00:03:00] best guess based on what they've looked at, with a drone, you can get that thing up there and it gives, really good information about exactly what path length and width was, and also at times you find, you find damage, you can't see it all from the ground.

it's a very useful tool.

John Dickow: Speaking of tools, I mean, there's another whole, we were talking a little bit before we officially started this recording, but, tools you can use software you can use. And you brought up one, that was called sky browse that actually kind of helps with the mapping, When you're surveying, when you're looking at this, footage, we talk a lot about mapping on this podcast and how you can map things out with drones, but we've never talked about it in a storm damage survey, kind of way. So can you talk about that a little bit about tools

Lou: Like I said, one of the things they're trying to figure out is, is path length, path width, and things like skybrows, which I've just started to, Use and, I still not an expert at it, but one of the things it has, it has very good measurement tools. So, if I could get a, 3D model of where there was storm [00:04:00] damage, I can get a really good idea of, the dimensions of it.

And that, that's really useful. I do want to put up this picture real quick here that's what you can get out of Sky Browse. you'll notice real on there on the picture, there's some numbers and what I've done is I've actually, done some measurements of those areas on the, picture so you can get really, exact if you don't really need to get that exact with storm damage, but, it's actually, Very good tool to get some very, good measurements of what you're looking at.

So that's 11 tool that I'm still playing with. I've done some other 3D mapping things. the thing that I'm still struggling with the 3D mapping is. As I said, it's a forensics thing. You want to get the evidence before it gets contaminated. you don't have a lot of time to plan a mission and figure out exactly where you're going to fly the drone.

And that's what I'm still struggling with using that. I mean, it still is a good tool.

John Dickow: absolutely. and speaking of visuals too, I mean, I just want to say that twister that's behind you

Lou: I was doing video at the time, but, that was a storm back in 2010 in Southeastern Colorado. it was a pretty [00:05:00] intense storm.

I'm going to show you, another picture. That is the, actually the same tornado. It's just going through a life cycle thing. not really related to, doing any storm damage surveys directly, but that's my storm chasing side. pretty cool stuff. no,

John Dickow: that's, that's.

Very, very cool. and we can actually look at a couple other photos that you've taken actually with the drone to aerials, but can you share with me the type of drone

Lou: currently fly a Mavic 3, not one of the enterprise drones, so it's, it's got some limitations. one of its limitations is I can't do the 3d mapping.

So I recently purchased an air two S which actually, you can use it. to fly some 3D mapping missions pretty well. It does it really good. so I'll use either one of those. If I'm not doing a, uh, a mapping mission, there's a good chance I'm going to put up the, uh, the Mavic 3 and take some pictures, with that.

One of the things you're looking for, and one of the things that the, aerial shot really helps with is you're looking for certain debris patterns, And they call it, convergent debris patterns, which is basically the debris points [00:06:00] towards itself rather than going in the same direction.

here's a shot I took with the drone. earlier this year. again, there's the forensics thing. Somebody was out there already, already chopping those trees up, they left it in a case where you could still figure out what had happened. I annotated that picture from the drone and you can see, a tree in the upper, left, there's a tree that's going sort of to the, right. And then you have trees down at the bottom And they're going to the left. So you can see that there's, debris pointing towards each other.

And that's one of the things that's really, you know, getting a drone up and looking for that is actually a really good, at times, because you can really see that, there's another one again, you know, you look at that and you go, yeah, that was a tornado because everything's sort of pointing at each other.

those are some of the things that in certain cases, getting the drone up is really going to show you that. when it goes through a cornfield, it leaves a really good, path if you can get a drone up to see the path that it leaves. There's a couple of things it's useful for. But again, the mapping, if I can get to the point where I'm comfortable using it, will be a good thing for path length, path width, and those kinds of [00:07:00] parameters.

John Dickow: Well, awesome. And I really appreciate you sharing those visuals. That really does kind of show you what just the advantage a drone can, provide, especially when it comes to, you need to get up in the air as soon as possible, when time is of the essence. it takes a lot longer to get a helicopter up in the air.

it can also be very expensive as well. drones are, clearly just kind of finding their own space here. And it's making everything easier. one thing I did want to say too, you'd mentioned mapping with the drone, you kind of mentioned two drones, one that you would use, like the Mavic you would use if you weren't doing as much mapping, what within a drone would you need in order to do the mapping?

You, there was kind of a second drone you brought up. what about what feature within that drone would be needed?

Lou: the mission planning part is the part that's difficult. the Mavic 3, when it first came out, you really couldn't even do waypoint flying.

now they have waypoint flying, but they don't have the programming SDK, I think that's the term, that you use to actually Programs can communicate with the drone. and the air two s doesn't. there's a litchy or leachy. I've heard it pronounced both ways, but that's one of the, programs that can be used to plan [00:08:00] missions really easily.

And that interfaces directly with the drone and drives the drone. and so that's why I got the Air 2X. That was the other one that I got.

John Dickow: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for, that. I did want to, give an opportunity. I like asking this question, especially. somebody who's doing the kind of work that you're doing. I believe you mentioned of as a storm chaser. And you found an application for a drone and, and at drone launch Academy, we have a lot of people, our community, who are looking to do just that, apply drones to their current interests set off on new, businesses, new endeavors with the drone and, and find their own niche and, It's something that you clearly did hear.

Do you have any advice for, people

Lou: If you want to go into this part of the storm surveying, really, develop a relationship with your local National Weather Service office. ultimately, they're going to be the ones that are going to.

have the best information for you, about where, they're looking, where they may want to do a survey, and you can help them out with, potentially getting a drone up and giving them some information that, they still have to figure out how they're going to get out there and look at it, So that would certainly help them [00:09:00] out. I don't do a lot of interfacing with the news media. I do a little bit, there are people that actually, use their drones in both storm chasing and storm surveying, more oriented towards the news media. if The mapping and stuff that we were talking about earlier probably is not something that's going to be really useful with that, but just getting up and getting, a picture that looks like that, they would love that, I'm not sure I have much more advice. I mean, like you said, I'm passionate about that.

That's great to do it. to me, it looks, it's useful and I, I, do it,

John Dickow: Well, that's great. that's a really good point of, developing those relationships. Cause you clearly have something to offer here.

That's a value. And finding the right people who, who need it, I think is, huge and a huge part of finding that niche. And so I really appreciate that, piece of advice. so Lou, I just really want to say thank you again for, coming on and, sharing, your experience in doing this kind of work.

and it's important work too. maybe down the road, we'll find a, an opportunity to dig a little deeper into this

Lou: thanks for having me. And, glad to do this. This is something I could talk for hours about this.

John Dickow: I'm glad we got to do it. And so this is Lou Rue. He [00:10:00] he's retired fire police Lieutenant. He's a storm chaser affiliated with Skywarn. he is a Skywarn coordinator with the national weather service. thank you again for joining and.

You can submit your own drone questions. We will find the answers to them. You can go ahead and go to YDQ a. io. You'll be able to type in your question there, or if you're part of the drone launch connect community, go ahead and submit a question to there. We'll see it. And we'll find the answer until then.

We'll see you in the sky.