Since sometime in late July, an innocuous gray drone has been quietly plying the skies over western Cullman County and beyond — all while collecting some delicate government data.

This isn’t the kind of info sweep that rings Bill of Rights alarm bells in the minds of surveillance-state watchers. In fact, it’s the kind that’ll soon all be publicly available … and the drone’s not watching you, but the weather.

Thanks to a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and Cullman Regional Airport, the airport was selected as the regional staging area for an extensive scan of the airspace above the Bankhead National Forest and environs. It’s a meteorological research project that doesn’t snap photos (there’s not even a camera anywhere aboard), but captures chemical signals instead — including data on “cloud, aerosol and atmospheric processes” that prove useful for the “atmospheric research community,” according to the agency.

Calling the unassuming aircraft a “drone” doesn’t really do justice to the sophisticated tech that fills nearly every available cubic inch of the 22’ wingspan vessel’s compact body. Handlers from the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), who’ve been on site in Cullman throughout the project, default to the industry’s standard terminology of UAS — short for “uncrewed aerial system.”

Capable of covering vast altitude changes, but primarily flying low, the UAS that’s been scooping up weather info has the look of a downsized conventional aircraft. “It looks a little like a Predator [the legendary military drone that saw extensive U.S. deployment in Afghanistan and beyond], but smaller,” says operations lead Pete Carroll, part of the PNNL team who enjoyed an extended stay in Cullman while seeing the project to completion. Weighing in at a svelte 650 pounds, the highly specialized UAS is known as the ArcticShark, a fixed-wing vehicle capable of flights that can last as long as eight hours.

Airport manager Ben Harrison said the project marks a significant milestone for Cullman Regional, which the department chose as its operating base from among several available options in north Alabama. “It’s really cool for us that we were selected,” he said. “They went through a selection process, and it’s an honor that we were identified as the facility that met their unique needs.”

Anchored by a fixed and centrally located observatory not far from Lamont, Oklahoma, the DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility maintains an ever-evolving mobile component — one whose most recent observatory focus has fallen on the Bankhead National Forest.

Through its recent research stint, as well as through future visits during the course of the five years, the project will periodically collect continuing data samples that cover weather-related measurables like humidity, temperature, cloud composition, trace gases, particles in the air and land surface features, among others. Scientists, the department explains, “will use these data to better understand weather and atmospheric processes.”