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Converted recon drones used to track hurricanes
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A pair of converted military drones are the US space agency’s newest tools for tracking hurricanes and tropical storms, with the aim of improving forecasters’ ability to predict them.
Originally built for military reconnaissance missions around the world, they are the size of large commercial jets and are flown remotely from a NASA base on the Virginia coast.
The drones are capable of flying for 30 hours at an altitude of 21,000 meters, or twice the height of a passenger plane.
They can also cover large swaths of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in a single mission, according to Chris Naftel, head of the drone project at NASA’s Dryden center in California, the secondary drone base.
The two Global Hawks began operating as NASA drones in 2012, as part of a project that will last for three years. The drones operate in the most active months, August and September, of the Atlantic hurricane season from June to the end of November.
“It opens a window into a storm we did not have before,” said Scott Braun, a research meteorologist on the project called HS3, short for the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel.
“Before we had short snap shots of individual storms at various times,” he said.
Until now, the old stand-bys for monitoring storms have been piloted weather planes and satellites, he said.
“By being able to view a storm continuously over a 20-hour period, you have a longer window to capture it,” he added. “This experiment will allow a better understanding of the processes that govern the intensification in the formation of storms.”
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