The Atlantic Main Development Region (AMDR) is known as the birthplace of tropical cyclones. A vast area of warm water stretching from the west coast of Africa to the east coast of the United States and the Gulf, it produces cyclones that periodically land in the United States with devastating effect. In 2024 alone, the cost of tropical cyclones in the United States was estimated at over $100 billion dollars and more than 300 lives.
Information about storm development can help organizations like NOAA learn more about cyclones, model their development, and predict how they’ll move and land. However, meteorological data from the AMDR is difficult to collect due to the remoteness of the location and the cost and risks of sending manned aircraft into hazardous weather.
To help solve this issue, NOAA used the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to fund Dragoon Technology, LLC, a company that builds small, unmanned aircraft that are low cost and long range, allowing scientists to access distant areas and gather information on the development of potentially devastating storms.
New Design Lets Drones Go Farther, Longer
Unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, are often referred to as drones. UAS have held promise for gathering information from hard-to-reach places like the AMDR, but so far, both a lack of sustained power and high costs have stopped them from reaching their potential. Dragoon Technology has used their SBIR support to address this issue by designing, building, and testing a UAS that is smaller, flies longer, and costs less than alternatives.
The Dragoon UAS, named Coriolis, includes both the drone itself and the setup that allows it to fly and be directed without a pilot. It is small, lightweight (under 30 pounds) and powered by Dragoon’s novel hybrid electronic propulsion system, a combination that gives it greater endurance and the ability to carry meteorological sensors for over 15 hours at a stretch.
Designed to be single-use and scalable, the UAS has everything it needs to fly built into one assembly that Dragoon calls the “Aircraft Management Unit.” And according to the Dragoon Technologies site, the cost-effectiveness of the UAS is assisted by “a tightly integrated tech stack and open software architecture [that] allows for low marginal cost and rapid innovation.”
Dragoon Technology: An SBIR Success
SBIR funding is intended to help American small businesses turn innovative ideas into practical, workable products that benefit the American population. Dragoon Technologies is an example of a rousing success for the program, as test flights of the Coriolis UAS in June of 2025 were successful. This opened the door for operational hurricane missions, and on July 16, 2025, Dragoon announced a partnership with NOAA to send its Coriolis UAS into an active hurricane.
Sean Culbertson, co-founder of Dragoon Technologies, says “[t]he NOAA SBIR program has been invaluable for Dragoon. It enabled us to take Coriolis – our long-range UAS platform for severe weather sampling – from concept to development and into initial operational use. The resulting capability represents a step-change in remote atmospheric sensing, enabling access to previously unsampled regions. The data it collects has the potential to greatly improve severe weather forecasting.”
As a recent Dragoon announcement says, the “successful system demonstration represents a new, scalable capability for NOAA—helping the agency collect more storm data at lower cost, ultimately enhancing forecasts and improving public safety.”