Academia to Response: Emergency Applications of Uncrewed Aircraft Systems in Typhoon Merbok Impacted Alaskan communities

On the 17th of September 2022, the first documented typhoon to hit Western Alaska made landfall, impacting over more than 900 miles of Alaskan coastline and 35 communities accessible only by airplane or boat. Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) were a critical tool employed during the response for obtaining preliminary post-storm situational awareness of storm impacts. Long-term partnerships between the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) researchers, storm impacted communities, federal and state agencies, allowed for swift deployment of UAF-affiliated UAS teams to perform these preliminary assessments. The Native Village of Unalakleet (NVU) was impacted by the storm and is one of these long-term partners of UAF that recently completed a UAS team development project to train drone pilots and to fly infrastructure inspections, flood mapping missions, oil spill detection, and search and rescue protocols using UAS, and to process and deliver those data to emergency operations centers. The NVU was the only typhoon impacted community of Western Alaska with UAS pilots trained on the scientific-grade UAS hardware and software that was also staged within the community for planning and emergency response scenarios. At the conclusion of the storm, the NVU UAS team deployed immediately to collect post-storm assessments of critical infrastructure in the community which were then processed as orthomosaics and PDFs for delivery to the state emergency operations center within 24-hours of collection and provided to local leaders for immediate decision-making for the community's storm response. This process was carried out by the trained pilots from UAF and NVU across the entire storm-impacted region and provided the emergency operations center with the only UAS data for Typhon Merbok response assessments. This preliminary dataset tested and solidified UAS protocols developed specifically for emergency response assessment scenarios in an academic setting, while simultaneously increased capacity for self-governance through greater information access across Western Alaska. This fast-tracked model is an example of successful collaboration among academics, communities and agencies, and a roadmap for successful integration of UAS technology at the local, regional, and statewide level, worldwide.