NASA’s Global Hawk unmanned aircraft flys over Hurricane Lelie in the Atlantic

September 8, 2012 |

Written by Alan Buis
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Pasadena, CA – NASA has begun its latest hurricane science field campaign by flying an unmanned Global Hawk aircraft over Hurricane Leslie in the Atlantic Ocean during a day-long flight that began in California and ended in Virginia.

With the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission, NASA for the first time will be flying Global Hawks from the U.S. East Coast.

An unmanned NASA Global Hawk aircraft comes in for a landing at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, VA, Sept. 7, kicking off the month-long Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission. HS3 will help researchers and forecasters uncover information about how hurricances and tropical storms form and intensify. (Image credit: NASA)

NASA will fly two Global Hawks from Wallops during the HS3 mission. The planes, which can stay in the air for as long as 28 hours and fly over hurricanes at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet (18,288 meters), will be operated by pilots in ground control stations at Wallops and Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, CA.

The flight path of the first HS3 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., on Sept. 5-6 included investigations of a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico and Hurricane Leslie in the Atlantic. (Image credit: NASA)

The mission targets the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change. The aircraft help scientists decipher the relative roles of the large-scale environment and internal storm processes that shape these systems. Studying hurricanes is a challenge for a field campaign like HS3 because of the small sample of storms available for study and the great variety of scenarios under which they form and evolve. HS3 flights will continue into early October of this year and be repeated from Wallops during the 2013 and 2014 hurricane seasons.

“The primary objective of the environmental Global Hawk is to describe the interaction of tropical disturbances and cyclones with the hot, dry and dusty air that moves westward off the Saharan desert and appears to affect the ability of storms to form and intensify,” said Scott Braun, HS3 mission principal investigator and research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

This Global Hawk will carry a laser system called the Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL), the Scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (S-HIS), and the Advanced Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System (AVAPS).

This visible image of Hurricane Leslie was captured by the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on Sept. 5 at 1:15pm EDT as the storm was approaching Bermuda. Leslie was just becoming a hurricane and its eye became visible. (Credit: NASA Goddard/MODIS Rapid Response Team)

The CPL will measure cloud structure and aerosols such as dust, sea salt and smoke particles. The S-HIS can remotely sense the temperature and water vapor vertical profile along with the sea surface temperature and cloud properties. The AVAPS dropsonde system will eject small sensors tied to parachutes that drift down through the storm, measuring winds, temperature and humidity.

“Instruments on the ‘over-storm’ Global Hawk will examine the role of deep thunderstorm systems in hurricane intensity change, particularly to detect changes in low-level wind fields in the vicinity of these thunderstorms,” said Braun.

These instruments will measure eyewall and rainband winds and precipitation using a Doppler radar and other microwave sensors called the High-altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP); the High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR), developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA; and the Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (HIRAD).

HIWRAP measures cloud structure and winds, providing a three-dimensional view of these conditions. HAMSR uses microwave wavelengths to measure temperature, water vapor and precipitation from the top of the storm to the surface. HIRAD measures surface wind speeds and rain rates.

The HS3 mission is supported by several NASA centers, including Wallops; Goddard; Dryden; Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA; Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL; and JPL. HS3 also has collaborations with partners from government agencies and academia.

HS3 is an Earth Venture mission funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Earth Venture missions are managed by NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA. The HS3 mission is managed by the Earth Science Project Office at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

For more about the HS3 mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/HS3 . For more on HAMSR, visit: http://microwavescience.jpl.nasa.gov/instruments/hamsr/ . For more on NASA’s Airborne Science Program, visit: http://airbornescience.nasa.gov .

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

Sections

Topics

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Connect with:

Enter your WordPress.com blog URL

http://.wordpress.com

Proceed

© 2006-2010 Clarksville, TN Online is owned and operated by residents of Clarksville Tennessee.
» We are Hosted by Compu-Net Enterprises; In Partnership with Discover Clarksville and Discover Paris