Each drone samples local temperature (which falls with altitude via the lapse rate)
and forwards it hop-by-hop through the mesh — any two drones within the link radius
can exchange data — until it reaches the ground station.
T(h) = T0 - L * h (L ≈ 6.5 °C/km, lapse rate)
link(i,j) = true if |pos_i - pos_j| < meshRadius
throughput ≈ links * sampleRate
- Fleet size — number of drones distributed through the altitude band.
- Mesh link radius — maximum distance over which two drones can talk directly; larger radius means a denser, more connected mesh.
- Altitude band — vertical spread the fleet is distributed across, from near-surface to upper layers.
- Wind drift — horizontal wind speed that slowly carries the whole formation sideways, testing the mesh's resilience to drift.
Real atmospheric drone mesh networks (used in wildfire, storm and pollution research)
trade a single expensive weather balloon for many cheap distributed sensors that
self-organise into a relay network back to a ground station, resolving atmospheric
structure a single sonde would miss.