Arctic Shark returns to the local sky

HALEYVILLE - Residents in the Haleyville area and Bankhead National Forest may report an unidentified flying object hovering in the skies over the next few weeks, but local aviation and city officials assure that it is all part of an ongoing  weather data collection project known as Atmospheric Radiation Measurement.
An informative meeting for the city was held Tuesday, Sept. 1, at the courtroom of Haleyville City Hall, attended by city officials, as well as those associated with the Posey Field Haleyville Municipal Airport and officials working with the uncrewed  aerial system flights that will be conducted in the Bankhead Forest through September 20.
Pete Carroll, UAS operations lead with the ARM Aerial Facility of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, based in Washington State, and Jonathan Stratman,  UAS specialist, were special guests at the meeting.
They gave a presentation, explaining they would be flying a drone with a 22-foot wingspan in and out of the Haleyville airport  to the Bankhead Forest through September 20, with each flight lasting three to five hours.
At the Bankhead Forest, the U.S. Department of Energy has established an atmospheric observatory, Carroll indicated.
“The Department of Energy runs this program through the Office of Science,” Carroll stated. 
“There’s an observation center in the Bankhead National Forest. What we do is fly a large drone and we do observations for weather atmospheric conditions with the drone.  They do the same thing from the ground,” Carroll explained.
“It’s all data that get pushed into that big system that scientists from all over the world use to configure different things like storm prediction, weather patterns, that kind of thing,” Carroll continued.