In the early morning of 15 November 2005, the unmanned Altair aircraft returned to Gray Butte Airfield, north of Los Angeles, Calif., after completing an 18.4‐hour mission over the eastern Pacific Ocean. The flight was the last in a series undertaken by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in its Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Demonstration Project. The successful flight series has helped start the era of unmanned flights in service of environmental goals. Altair cruised at altitudes in the lower stratosphere (13 kilo‐meters; ∼43,000 feet), collecting atmospheric data with a 140‐kilogram payload of both remote and in situ instruments.

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A Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) is a necessity for communication nodes that may need to wait for long periods to form networks. The IETF Delay Tolerant NetworkResearch Group is developing protocols to enable such networks for a broad variety of Earth and interplanetary applications. The Arctic would benefit from a predictive velocity-enabled version of DTN that would facilitate communications between sparse, ephemeral, often mobile and extremely power-limited nodes. We propose to augment DTN with power-aware, buffer-aware location-and time-based predictive routing for ad-hoc meshes to create networks that are inherently location and time (velocity) aware at the network level to support climate research, emergency services and rural education in the Arctic. On Earth, the primary source of location and universal time information for networks is the Global Positioning System (GPS). We refer to this Arctic velocity-enabled Delay-Tolerant Network protocol as "GPSDTN" accordingly. This paper describes our requirements analysis and general implementation strategy for GPSDTN to support Arctic research and sustainability efforts.