Scott Braun is the Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission principal investigator and a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Scott studies hurricanes from the inside out. HS3 is a five-year mission specifically targeted to investigate hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean basin.

In his role as Principal Investigator, Scott leads a diverse team of hurricane and instrument scientists to design and conduct experiments using NASA's two Global Hawk unmanned aircraft to understand better the meteorological conditions that favor storm formation and often lead to the development of major hurricanes.

The campaign is set to take to the sky this September from Wallops Island, Va. Scott recently answered some questions about the HS3 mission:

Q: What is the biggest difference between past NASA hurricane field campaigns and HS3? Will the two Global Hawks have different instruments onboard?

A: The key differences from previous NASA hurricane field campaigns is that HS3 is a multi-year (2012-2014) rather than single year effort.It will utilize two of the unmanned Global Hawk aircraft flying from the U. S. east coast rather than one Global Hawk flying from the west coast as was the case during the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) campaign in 2010. (For information about GRIP, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/GRIP).

Three of the instruments flying on the HS3 mission had flown in GRIP, but on two separate aircraft. Now they will fly together on one Global Hawk (called the over-storm aircraft) to observe the inner-core region of hurricanes. The second Global Hawk (called the environmental aircraft) will be equipped with instruments that were not part of previous campaigns and will sample the large-scale environment of storms to see if conditions are favorable for storm formation and intensification.

Q: How will the mission work? Every time a hurricane is approaching, will the Global Hawk fly to meet it? How far and how long the planes will fly?

A: We will not be flying every storm, but will select storms that are likely to yield the best science. We are in the field for only five weeks and have science flight hours for only about 10-11 flights. Depending on how we use the flight hours, we could do five flights each for two storms or two flights each for five storms, or something like that.

A lot will depend on the storms that occur and whether we think they are events from which we have a lot to learn. In previous campaigns with manned aircraft based in a specific location, we had to wait for storms to come close to the U.S.

Because the Global Hawks can fly for up to about 26-28 hours and have a range of more than 12,000 miles, we can reach anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean basin, so we can either choose to spend a smaller amount of time over a storm in the Central Atlantic or spend a great deal more time over storms in the Western Atlantic, Caribbean, or Gulf of Mexico.

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Interview With Scott Braun About NASA's Upcoming Hurricane Campaign