Image Caption: Photo of the new purple CPL with the Global Hawk. Credit: NASA

Cutting-edge NASA technology has made this years NASA Hurricane mission a reality. NASA and other scientists are currently flying a suite of state-of-the-art, autonomously operated instruments that are gathering difficult-to-obtain measurements of wind speeds, precipitation, and cloud structures in and around tropical storms.

Making these measurements possible is the platform on which the instruments are flying, said Paul Newman, the deputy principal investigator of NASAs Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3), managed by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. HS3 will use NASAs unmanned Global Hawks, which are capable of flying at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet with flight durations of up to 28 hours capabilities that increase the amount of data scientists can collect. Its a brand-new way to do science, Newman said.

The month-long HS3 mission, which began in early September, is actually a more robust follow-on to NASAs Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) experiment that scientists executed in 2010. Often referred to as GRIP on steroids, HS3 is currently deploying one instrument-laden Global Hawk from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginias Eastern Shore to look at the environment of tropical storms. In 2013 and 2014, a second Global Hawk will be added that will focus on getting detailed measurements of the inner core of hurricanes.

Without this new aircraft, developed originally for the U.S. Air Force to gather intelligence and surveillance data, the team says the mission wouldnt be possible.

The Global Hawks ability to fly for a much longer period of time than manned aircraft will allow it to obtain previously difficult-to-get data. Scientists hope to use that data to gain new insights into how tropical storms form, and more importantly, how they intensify into major Atlantic hurricanes information that forecasters need to make better storm predictions, save lives, and ultimately prevent costly coastal evacuations if a storm doesnt warrant them.

Because you can get to Africa from Wallops, well be able to study developing systems way out into the Atlantic, Newman explained. Normal planes, which can fly for no more than about 10 hours, often miss the points where storms intensify, added Gerry Heymsfield, a Goddard scientist who used NASA Research and Development funding to create one of the missions six instruments, the High-altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP). With the Global Hawks, we have a much higher chance of capturing these events. Furthermore, we can sit on targets for a long time.

Just as important as the aircraft are the new or enhanced instruments designed to gather critical wind, temperature, humidity, and aerosol measurements in the environment surrounding the storm and the rain and wind patterns occurring inside their inner cores, they added. The instruments bring it all together, Newman said. We didnt have these instruments 10 years ago.

The Global Hawk currently on deployment at Wallops is known as the environmental aircraft because it samples the environment in which hurricanes are embedded. It carries three instruments.

A Goddard-provided laser system called the Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) is located in the nose. CPL measures cloud structures and aerosols, such as dust, sea salt particles, and smoke particles, by bouncing laser light off these elements. An infrared instrument called the Scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (S-HIS), provided by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, sits in the belly of the aircraft. It measures the vertical profile of temperature and water vapor.

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NASA's Hurricane Mission A Reality Due To Cutting-Edge Technology