The use of Global Hawks to spy on hurricane next season promises to
revolutionize our understanding of how a disturbance becomes a
hurricane and why some develop so rapidly…
...NASA’s Dr. Ramesh Kakar can hardly hide his excitement. Come next
hurricane season, he and others who hope to better understand the life-cycle
of hurricanes will get an “unprecedented” look at the inner workings of a
hurricane.
...The NASA experiment is designed not only to help experts better
understand which tropical disturbances will develop, but to help them predict
which ones will intensify into monsters. The intensity question seems
particularly important. There’s little more frightening than seeing a Category 2
hurricane turn into a Category 4 or 5 overnight.
...In the 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Process experiment, NASA
will use its newly acquired, high-flying Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles
to spy on storms. The UAVs will give forecasters something they’ve never
before had: eyes in the sky that will provide a longer, sustained look at storms
as they develop.
...And that’s a big change. Right now, instruments aboard low Earth orbiting
satellites can only get a glimpse at hurricanes as they pass over on their fixed
orbits. With a Global Hawk, those same cloud-piercing instruments can
remain over a hurricane for hours on end, and provide moment by moment
data on its development.
...“That is unprecedented. For the first time – and I find this extremely
exciting – with the same satellite instruments we’re going to station ourselves
over the area of interest for, in my opinion, between 15 and 20 hours, and see
how this disturbance develops into a hurricane and, in some cases, how a
hurricane develops further or fizzles out,” said Kakar, weather focus area
leader in the Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in
Washington, D.C.
The new tool
...It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Global Hawk to GRIP.
...The Northrop Grumman-built Global Hawk has become a poster child for
the new age of unmanned aerial vehicles. The combat-proven, jet-powered
Global Hawk is usually associated with warfare, and in fact the prototype was
pushed into service during the war in Afghanistan. One of its strongest
characteristics is its ability to remain airborne for extended periods of time at
altitudes as high as 60,000 feet.
...The aircraft is also something of a poster child for the Gulf Coast region.
Global Hawk central fuselage work is done at the Northrop Grumman
Unmanned Systems Center in Moss Point, Miss. Global Hawk and the Fire
Scout unmanned helicopter together are South Mississippi’s calling card into
the high-tech, growing UAV field.
...While the Air Force has the longest track record with the Global Hawk,
other agencies have since come on board and ordered their own aircraft. The
Navy chose the platform for its Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Program,
and Germany is getting its own version, EuroHawk, with a European-created
payload.
...But its importance in civilian applications has been obvious for a long time.
...NASA in December 2007 received two Global Hawks from the Air Force,
and both are based at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force
Base, Calif. They are the first and sixth aircraft built under the original
DARPA Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program.
...Last year with NASA unveiled the new birds with the NASA paint schemes,
the agency said the two Global Hawks would be used to support NASA’s
Science Mission Directorate and the Earth science community, which require
high-altitude, long-endurance, long-distance airborne capability.
...The initial mission for the NASA birds was Global Hawk Pacific 2009, six
long-duration missions over the Pacific and Arctic. Outfitted with a dozen
NASA and NOAA scientific instruments, they collect atmospheric data while
flying in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.
...But it’s not the first time Global Hawks have been used in the civilian
world. It was used to spy on the fires that raged in California. And during the
2008 hurricane season, the Air Force considered using a Global Hawk over
Hurricane Gustav, but that mission was scrubbed. Later in the season, a Navy
Global Hawk from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., flew a 24-hour
mission and was over Hurricane Ike for 13 hours as it came ashore in Texas.
It took over 600 images.
...While images from a Global Hawk could help in evacuations and damage
assessment, that’s not what interested Kakar about the new tool at NASA’s
disposal. He is more interested in deploying microwave remote sensors on-
board that can pierce through the clouds.
...He already knew the potential. Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission radar
aboard the TRMM satellite provides a CAT Scan view of what’s happening
below the clouds when it passes over a hurricane. It’s important information,
but remains just a brief glimpse. But with an aircraft that can loiter, “we can
see with authority what is happening.”
Getting a GRIP
...Experts know that most of the major hurricanes that hit the United States
originate as weather disturbances out of Africa. Kakar said these African
Easterly Waves “come like clockwork every three, four days during the
hurricane season, essentially from May until October and maybe sometime in
November. So we get 60 or 65 of these every year.”
...And there are some similarities in these disturbances.
...“These are generally associated with thunderstorms, precipitation and wind.
When these disturbances organize into a closed circular pattern called a vortex
with wind exceeding 39 miles per hour, we get a tropical storm and when
these winds exceed 74 miles per hour a hurricane is born,” Kakar said.
...And that’s the crux of the matter. They start out similar, but some develop
and some don’t. And that’s what it all boils down to: identifying the conditions
under which some will become hurricanes, as well as the conditions that cause
some to develop more rapidly than others.
...“So we do this experiment to first of all identify which one becomes a
hurricane and which one just fizzles out. Then once it forms we’re going to
see which one rapidly intensifies, which one fizzles out and why. And so that’
s basically in a sense our experiment,” Kakar said.
...It’s not that the experts have no idea. They certainly do, and there are
models that are used that have, according to Kakar, become pretty good. But
what is often the case is these models predict more hurricanes will develop
than actually do. The question is why.
...For Kakar, whose interest and expertise is the development of the satellite
instruments, Global Hawk represented intriguing possibilities, most notably the
aircraft’s ability to loiter over an area of interest. Imagine parking satellite
instruments above the storm.
...“That intrigued me,” said Kakar.
...GRIP is designed to do just that with the Global Hawk.
...While GRIP will study storms coming from Africa, it may also look at "pop-
up" hurricanes that form just off the coasts where they eventually hit. There is
certainly an interest in studying this form of hurricane genesis, but "pop-ups"
would be tough to study because by their very nature they provide mission
planners little time to get to with the Global Hawk. Still, it’s possible GRIP
will study them in 2010.
The Global Hawk role
...A Global Hawk will fly only when the team believes the conditions exist that
are conducive to the formation of a hurricane. That will be a tricky part. The
Global Hawk will take off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, and it
will take four to five hours just to get to the East Coast.
...Remotely controlled from the other side of the country, the Global Hawk
will fly a pattern dictated by the experiment. The length of time it will be able
to loiter over the hurricane will depend on how far it has to go to get there.
Clearly the idea is to let it stay over the storm as long as possible.
...An ideal situation would be to have the Global Hawk already on the East
Coast. The team is taking a look at the possibility of mobile launching,
perhaps at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia or the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida.
...“This year will be lean, getting the instruments and the aircraft ready for the
big experiment in 2010,” said Kakar, who said about 100 people will be
working on the mission. In addition to the Global Hawk, GRIP will also utilize
the services of its DC-8.
...And NASA isn’t the only one that will be involved. NOAA will fly one or
two P-3s into the same storms, and there will be the Hurricane Hunters going
inside the eye of the hurricanes, “so we’ll have five or six aircraft in the stack.”
...“One simple way of looking at this is, NASA’s a space agency. We are
much more interested in remote sensing. We want to fly over these other
systems and see what is happening underneath. So we are going to measure
temperature, moisture, wind velocity inside the hurricane or inside an African
Easterly Wave, with sensors which are flying above these other systems. The
Hurricane Hunter flies through and they usually have what we call ‘in-situ
measurements’ from sensors on-board the aircraft as well as sensors that drop
to the ground and take measurements while dropping.”
...For NASA, Global Hawk is a fairly new platform and Kakar said they will
need time to become familiar with the system and to integrate it in the
mission. And there’s one other thing – they will need to muster the confidence
to fly it over a hurricane.
...“We will try to fly in concert. In fact, one of our aircraft is probably going
to fly inside the hurricane – and that’s our DC-8 – because we are still trying
to learn what our remote sensing instruments, what they measure and how it
correlates with what’s really happening inside. So we’re going to have both
types of sensors.”
The future
...Kakar feels confident the 2010 season will provide a lot of new data.
...“I think the amount of information we’re going to gleen is going to keep the
modelers happy for many, many years to come,” he said.
...And whether the Global Hawk will have a future in hurricane coverage
beyond the 2010 experiment remains to be seen. Kakar sees the Global Hawk
as being a transitional platform, his ersatz satellite that could lead to the
development of real geostationary satellites dedicated to covering hurricanes.
...“That’s exactly how I sold this process,” said Kakar, who said that it would
be great to make current low-orbiting satellite instruments available on
geostationary platforms of the future that would be able to provide persistent
coverage of disturbances as they develop over time.
...“Since we do not have them right now, this is the best we can do with the
help of the Global Hawk,” Kakar said. “The Global Hawk is kind of my
geosynchronist orbit simulator.” - David Tortorano
July 2009
revolutionize our understanding of how a disturbance becomes a
hurricane and why some develop so rapidly…
...NASA’s Dr. Ramesh Kakar can hardly hide his excitement. Come next
hurricane season, he and others who hope to better understand the life-cycle
of hurricanes will get an “unprecedented” look at the inner workings of a
hurricane.
...The NASA experiment is designed not only to help experts better
understand which tropical disturbances will develop, but to help them predict
which ones will intensify into monsters. The intensity question seems
particularly important. There’s little more frightening than seeing a Category 2
hurricane turn into a Category 4 or 5 overnight.
...In the 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Process experiment, NASA
will use its newly acquired, high-flying Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles
to spy on storms. The UAVs will give forecasters something they’ve never
before had: eyes in the sky that will provide a longer, sustained look at storms
as they develop.
...And that’s a big change. Right now, instruments aboard low Earth orbiting
satellites can only get a glimpse at hurricanes as they pass over on their fixed
orbits. With a Global Hawk, those same cloud-piercing instruments can
remain over a hurricane for hours on end, and provide moment by moment
data on its development.
...“That is unprecedented. For the first time – and I find this extremely
exciting – with the same satellite instruments we’re going to station ourselves
over the area of interest for, in my opinion, between 15 and 20 hours, and see
how this disturbance develops into a hurricane and, in some cases, how a
hurricane develops further or fizzles out,” said Kakar, weather focus area
leader in the Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in
Washington, D.C.
The new tool
...It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Global Hawk to GRIP.
...The Northrop Grumman-built Global Hawk has become a poster child for
the new age of unmanned aerial vehicles. The combat-proven, jet-powered
Global Hawk is usually associated with warfare, and in fact the prototype was
pushed into service during the war in Afghanistan. One of its strongest
characteristics is its ability to remain airborne for extended periods of time at
altitudes as high as 60,000 feet.
...The aircraft is also something of a poster child for the Gulf Coast region.
Global Hawk central fuselage work is done at the Northrop Grumman
Unmanned Systems Center in Moss Point, Miss. Global Hawk and the Fire
Scout unmanned helicopter together are South Mississippi’s calling card into
the high-tech, growing UAV field.
...While the Air Force has the longest track record with the Global Hawk,
other agencies have since come on board and ordered their own aircraft. The
Navy chose the platform for its Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Program,
and Germany is getting its own version, EuroHawk, with a European-created
payload.
...But its importance in civilian applications has been obvious for a long time.
...NASA in December 2007 received two Global Hawks from the Air Force,
and both are based at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force
Base, Calif. They are the first and sixth aircraft built under the original
DARPA Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program.
...Last year with NASA unveiled the new birds with the NASA paint schemes,
the agency said the two Global Hawks would be used to support NASA’s
Science Mission Directorate and the Earth science community, which require
high-altitude, long-endurance, long-distance airborne capability.
...The initial mission for the NASA birds was Global Hawk Pacific 2009, six
long-duration missions over the Pacific and Arctic. Outfitted with a dozen
NASA and NOAA scientific instruments, they collect atmospheric data while
flying in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.
...But it’s not the first time Global Hawks have been used in the civilian
world. It was used to spy on the fires that raged in California. And during the
2008 hurricane season, the Air Force considered using a Global Hawk over
Hurricane Gustav, but that mission was scrubbed. Later in the season, a Navy
Global Hawk from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., flew a 24-hour
mission and was over Hurricane Ike for 13 hours as it came ashore in Texas.
It took over 600 images.
...While images from a Global Hawk could help in evacuations and damage
assessment, that’s not what interested Kakar about the new tool at NASA’s
disposal. He is more interested in deploying microwave remote sensors on-
board that can pierce through the clouds.
...He already knew the potential. Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission radar
aboard the TRMM satellite provides a CAT Scan view of what’s happening
below the clouds when it passes over a hurricane. It’s important information,
but remains just a brief glimpse. But with an aircraft that can loiter, “we can
see with authority what is happening.”
Getting a GRIP
...Experts know that most of the major hurricanes that hit the United States
originate as weather disturbances out of Africa. Kakar said these African
Easterly Waves “come like clockwork every three, four days during the
hurricane season, essentially from May until October and maybe sometime in
November. So we get 60 or 65 of these every year.”
...And there are some similarities in these disturbances.
...“These are generally associated with thunderstorms, precipitation and wind.
When these disturbances organize into a closed circular pattern called a vortex
with wind exceeding 39 miles per hour, we get a tropical storm and when
these winds exceed 74 miles per hour a hurricane is born,” Kakar said.
...And that’s the crux of the matter. They start out similar, but some develop
and some don’t. And that’s what it all boils down to: identifying the conditions
under which some will become hurricanes, as well as the conditions that cause
some to develop more rapidly than others.
...“So we do this experiment to first of all identify which one becomes a
hurricane and which one just fizzles out. Then once it forms we’re going to
see which one rapidly intensifies, which one fizzles out and why. And so that’
s basically in a sense our experiment,” Kakar said.
...It’s not that the experts have no idea. They certainly do, and there are
models that are used that have, according to Kakar, become pretty good. But
what is often the case is these models predict more hurricanes will develop
than actually do. The question is why.
...For Kakar, whose interest and expertise is the development of the satellite
instruments, Global Hawk represented intriguing possibilities, most notably the
aircraft’s ability to loiter over an area of interest. Imagine parking satellite
instruments above the storm.
...“That intrigued me,” said Kakar.
...GRIP is designed to do just that with the Global Hawk.
...While GRIP will study storms coming from Africa, it may also look at "pop-
up" hurricanes that form just off the coasts where they eventually hit. There is
certainly an interest in studying this form of hurricane genesis, but "pop-ups"
would be tough to study because by their very nature they provide mission
planners little time to get to with the Global Hawk. Still, it’s possible GRIP
will study them in 2010.
The Global Hawk role
...A Global Hawk will fly only when the team believes the conditions exist that
are conducive to the formation of a hurricane. That will be a tricky part. The
Global Hawk will take off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, and it
will take four to five hours just to get to the East Coast.
...Remotely controlled from the other side of the country, the Global Hawk
will fly a pattern dictated by the experiment. The length of time it will be able
to loiter over the hurricane will depend on how far it has to go to get there.
Clearly the idea is to let it stay over the storm as long as possible.
...An ideal situation would be to have the Global Hawk already on the East
Coast. The team is taking a look at the possibility of mobile launching,
perhaps at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia or the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida.
...“This year will be lean, getting the instruments and the aircraft ready for the
big experiment in 2010,” said Kakar, who said about 100 people will be
working on the mission. In addition to the Global Hawk, GRIP will also utilize
the services of its DC-8.
...And NASA isn’t the only one that will be involved. NOAA will fly one or
two P-3s into the same storms, and there will be the Hurricane Hunters going
inside the eye of the hurricanes, “so we’ll have five or six aircraft in the stack.”
...“One simple way of looking at this is, NASA’s a space agency. We are
much more interested in remote sensing. We want to fly over these other
systems and see what is happening underneath. So we are going to measure
temperature, moisture, wind velocity inside the hurricane or inside an African
Easterly Wave, with sensors which are flying above these other systems. The
Hurricane Hunter flies through and they usually have what we call ‘in-situ
measurements’ from sensors on-board the aircraft as well as sensors that drop
to the ground and take measurements while dropping.”
...For NASA, Global Hawk is a fairly new platform and Kakar said they will
need time to become familiar with the system and to integrate it in the
mission. And there’s one other thing – they will need to muster the confidence
to fly it over a hurricane.
...“We will try to fly in concert. In fact, one of our aircraft is probably going
to fly inside the hurricane – and that’s our DC-8 – because we are still trying
to learn what our remote sensing instruments, what they measure and how it
correlates with what’s really happening inside. So we’re going to have both
types of sensors.”
The future
...Kakar feels confident the 2010 season will provide a lot of new data.
...“I think the amount of information we’re going to gleen is going to keep the
modelers happy for many, many years to come,” he said.
...And whether the Global Hawk will have a future in hurricane coverage
beyond the 2010 experiment remains to be seen. Kakar sees the Global Hawk
as being a transitional platform, his ersatz satellite that could lead to the
development of real geostationary satellites dedicated to covering hurricanes.
...“That’s exactly how I sold this process,” said Kakar, who said that it would
be great to make current low-orbiting satellite instruments available on
geostationary platforms of the future that would be able to provide persistent
coverage of disturbances as they develop over time.
...“Since we do not have them right now, this is the best we can do with the
help of the Global Hawk,” Kakar said. “The Global Hawk is kind of my
geosynchronist orbit simulator.” - David Tortorano
July 2009
Aerospace/geospatial
The eye on the storm
The eye on the storm
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