Drone News: Two New UAS Test Sites, Weather Forecasting Drones, Aerial Crop Intelligence

Welcome to your weekly UAS News Update. We have three stories for you this week the FAA is adding two new UAS test sites, NOAA is officially using drones for daily weather forecasting operations and SiFly and Taranis are teaming up to scale up aerial crop intelligence. Let's get to it.

First up, the FAA has announced it's adding two new UAS Test Sites, which is a huge deal because it’s the first time they’ve expanded the program in almost ten years. The new sites are in partnership with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. This brings the total number of federal test ranges up to nine, joining the existing sites in Alaska, North Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Texas, and Virginia. If you aren’t familiar, the whole point of these test sites is to create a space for real-world testing to collect the data needed to safely integrate drones into our national airspace.According to the FAA, this is all about advancing Beyond Visual Line of Sight, or BVLOS, operations, as well as things like cargo delivery and managing multiple drone operations at once. The Choctaw Nation site will focus on practical applications like delivery services, infrastructure inspection, and emergency response missions across tribal lands. Meanwhile, the Indiana site will concentrate more on industrial and commercial uses, like cargo logistics, energy infrastructure, and agricultural monitoring. This expansion allows the FAA to gather the data they need to finally build the safety cases and regulations for these advanced operations. Next up, weather drones are officially moving from testing into operational use for US weather forecasting. For decades, forecasters have had a major blind spot in the lower atmosphere, which is where a lot of disruptive weather forms. Now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is partnering with a company called Meteomatics to fill that data gap.Meteomatics’ autonomous "Meteodrones" will be flying vertical profiles through the atmosphere to measure temperature, humidity, and wind. This data will be fed directly into the National Weather Service's daily forecasting operations. This is a big step up from a research program that started back in 2024 in North Dakota. Now, it's not just research; it's part of the daily toolkit for forecasters. An initial pilot program is already running in Oklahoma through April of 2026, with drones being managed from a remote "Meteobase." Better data at these critical altitudes means more accurate forecasts and more timely warnings.And in our final story this week, two companies are partnering to tackle one of the biggest challenges in agricultural drone use: scale. SiFly, a U.S.-based manufacturer of long-endurance VTOL drones, and Taranis, a leader in AI-powered crop intelligence, have launched a joint Field Validation Program. The goal is to prove out a new operational model for collecting crop data over massive areas. The star of the show here is SiFly's Q12 drone, with a three hour flight time. This improves the efficiency of data collection and makes the data itself more consistent. The flight time introduces a problem though, data management, which is where the Taranis comes in, processing the data in real time. The program will run during the 2026 growing season to validate how this combination of long-endurance flight and AI analysis can make aerial intelligence more scalable and affordable for farmers and agronomists.That’s it for this week, we’ll see you on Monday for Post Flight, our show where we share our opinions that aren’t always suitable for YouTube and for the live! https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sifly-and-taranis-launch-field-validation-program-to-accelerate-aerial-crop-intelligence-at-scale-302666560.htmlhttps://dronelife.com/2026/01/14/faa-adds-two-new-uas-test-sites-to-advance-drone-integration/https://dronedj.com/2026/01/16/meteomatics-meteodrones-noaa-weather-drone/