NASA'S Global Hawk Mission Begins With Flight to Hurricane Leslie

Sept. 7, 2012

Steve Cole
Headquarters, Washington
stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov
202-358-0918

Keith Koehler
Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.
keith.a.koehler@nasa.gov
757-824-1579


RELEASE: 12-310

NASA'S GLOBAL HAWK MISSION BEGINS WITH FLIGHT TO HURRICANE LESLIE

WASHINGTON -- 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 from California
to 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.

The Global Hawk took off from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at
Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Thursday and landed at the agency's
Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., today at 11:37 a.m.
EDT after spending 10 hours collecting data on Hurricane Leslie. The
month-long HS3 mission will help researchers and forecasters uncover
information about how hurricanes and tropical storms form and
intensify.

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, will be
operated by pilots in ground control stations at Wallops and Dryden
Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

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 first Global Hawk arrived Sept. 7 at Wallops carrying a payload of
three instruments that will sample the environment around hurricanes.
A second Global Hawk, scheduled to arrive in two weeks, will look
inside hurricanes and developing storms with a different set of
instruments. The pair will measure winds, temperature, water vapor,
precipitation and aerosols from the surface to the lower
stratosphere.

"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 NASA1s 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).

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), High-Altitude MMIC Sounding
Radiometer (HAMSR) and 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,
Calif.; Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.; and the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 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 information about NASA's Airborne Science Program, visit:

http://airbornescience.nasa.gov


-end-



To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
hqnews-subscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov
To remove your address from the list, send a message to:
hqnews-unsubscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov