NASA to Send Unmanned Aircraft Over Hurricanes This Year
Posted on June 2, 2012
NASA will be sending unmanned aircraft dubbed "severe storm sentinels" above hurricanes this season to help researchers and forecasters uncover information about hurricane formation and intensity changes. The Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1st. The mission is called the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) airborne mission.
NASA's unmanned sentinels are autonomously flown. The NASA Global Hawk is well-suited for hurricane investigations because it can over-fly hurricanes at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet with flight durations of up to 28 hours - something piloted aircraft would find nearly impossible to do. Global Hawks were used in the agency's 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) hurricane mission and the Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) environmental science mission.
Scott Braun, HS3 mission principal investigator and research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says, "Hurricane intensity can be very hard to predict because of an insufficient understanding of how clouds and wind patterns within a storm interact with the storm's environment. HS3 seeks to improve our understanding of these processes by taking advantage of the surveillance capabilities of the Global Hawk along with measurements from a suite of advanced instruments."
HS3 will use two Global Hawk aircraft and six different instruments this summer, flying from a base of operations at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. HS3 will examine the large-scale environment that tropical storms form in and move through and how that environment affects the inner workings of the storms. HS3 will also address the controversial role of the hot, dry, and dusty Saharan Air Layer in tropical storm formation and intensification.
Braun says, "One aircraft will sample the environment of storms while the other will measure eyewall and rainband winds and precipitation."
You can find out more about the mission here.