the first of two
unmanned Global Hawk aircraft landed at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in
Wallops Island, Virginia, on Aug. 27 after surveying Hurricane Cristobal for
the first science flight of NASA's latest hurricane airborne mission.
NASA's airborne Hurricane and Severe
Storm Sentinel, or HS3, mission returns to NASA Wallops for the third year to
investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity
change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. HS3 is a collaborative effort that brings
together several NASA centers with federal and university partners.
The two
unmanned Global Hawks participating
in HS3 are based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research
Center at Edwards Air Base, California, but will be temporarily housed at NASA Wallops for the duration of the HS3 mission
which runs through Sept. 29. That window for the mission coincides with the
peak of the Atlantic hurricane season that runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
NASA Global Hawk 872 departed NASA
Armstrong on the morning of Aug. 26 and arrived at NASA Wallops at 7:43 a.m.
EDT on Aug. 27. Global Hawk number 871 is scheduled to fly to Wallops within a
week.
The Global
Hawk flew this lawnmower flight pattern over Hurricane Cristobal on August 26,
2014. Credit:
Image Credit:
NASA
Tropical
Storm Cristobal became a hurricane late on August 25 as it was moving through
the Bahamas. During the Global Hawk's 22 hour mission it flew a
"lawnmower" or back and forth pattern over Hurricane Cristobal whilegathering data using dropsondes and two other instruments. There were 83dropsondes loaded in the aircraft, with two of them were dropped over the Gulf
of Mexico and the other 81 dropsondes dropped over Cristobal. A dropsonde
is a device that measures winds, temperature, pressure and humidity as it falls
from the aircraft to the surface.
“The instruments are tested and then
integrated onto each Global Hawk at Armstrong,” said Marilyn Vasques, HS3
Project Manager of NASA Ames. Before the cross-country flights, the ground
operations center at Wallops tested the various instruments aboard both
aircraft while they were still at Armstrong. “After integration and outdoor
tests we conduct a Combined Systems Test on the ground as well as a test flight
near Armstrong before the instruments and aircraft are ready to transit”
explained Vasques. Checking the performance of the instruments over that long
distance while they were at a NASA center was critical to ensure they would
operate correctly while in-flight over Atlantic hurricanes.
Now that the first Global Hawk is at
Wallops, the mission will investigate any significant disturbances that might
develop in the western Atlantic. The HS3 mission will investigate disturbances
before they become depressions to examine how a storm forms. The mission is
also looking for conditions that favor (or promote) rapid intensification of
tropical cyclones.
"Twice a day we hold weather
briefings looking for storms or disturbances that could become storms,"
said Scott Braun, HS3 Principal Investigator from NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, working at Wallops during the mission. "We
evaluate the targets in terms of our science objectives and determine which one
best addresses those objectives. We factor in stage of the life cycle of the
storm, likelihood of formation or intensification, interaction with the Saharan
Air Layer, among other things."
During the mission period, the GlobalHawks will be operated from Wallops where they will depart and fly over
tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, analyzing the storms with six scientific
instruments. The East Coast NASA location makes accessing Atlantic tropical
cyclones easier and allows for more science data collection than if they were
to fly from the West Coast. Each aircraft has an 11,000-nautical-mile range and
can fly for up to 26 hours.
Members of
the HS3 team monitor the transit flight of the NASA Global Hawk 872 aircraft in
the Wallops Flight Facility control center. The aircraft departed the Armstrong
Flight Research Center in California at 9:08 a.m. EDT on August 26.
Image
Credit:
NASA Wallops
One Global
Hawk will carry three instruments to examine the environment around the storms,
including the Scanning High-resolution
Interferometer Sounder (S-HIS), the Advanced Vertical Atmospheric
Profiling System (AVAPS), also known as dropsondes, and the Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL).
The second
Global Hawk will focus on the inner region of the storms to measure wind and
precipitation, surface winds, and atmospheric temperature and humidity. It will
carry the High-Altitude Imaging Wind and
Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP) conically scanning Doppler
radar, the Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (HIRAD), and
the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave
Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR) microwave sounder.
The HS3
mission is funded by NASA Headquarters and overseen by NASA's Earth System Science
Pathfinder Program at NASA's Langley Research Centerin
Hampton, Virginia. It is one of five large airborne campaigns operating under
the Earth Venture program.
The HS3 mission also involves collaborations with partners including theNational Centers for Environmental Prediction, Naval
Postgraduate School,Naval Research
Laboratory, NOAA's Unmanned Aircraft System Program, Hurricane Research Division and Earth System
Research Laboratory, Northrop Grumman
Space Technology, National Center for Atmospheric Research
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