NASA planes to study major hurricanes this season

[Vortex]

Source:Sunsentinel

NASA planes to study major hurricanes

NASA, best known for launching space shuttles, plans to dispatch three unusual airplanes this summer to investigate why some tropical systems suddenly become major hurricanes.

One of those planes, a 44-year-old, four-engine Douglas DC-8 jet, will be based at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

"It's been modified into any airborne science laboratory," said Alan Brown, NASA spokesman.

Under a six-week mission, to be conducted during the busiest stretch of the hurricane season, the planes will fly in and around tropical storms to sample the atmosphere.

Using sophisticated microwave and radar instruments, they will gather data on temperature, wind, pressure, humidity and other measurements. NASA also will draw on three satellites to collect information.

The idea is to figure out how major hurricanes – Category 3, 4 and 5 – form and why many of them rapidly intensify, a process the National Hurricane Center in Miami-Dade County doesn't fully understand.

Ultimately, NASA hopes to help the hurricane center improve forecasts, said Michael Finneran, space agency spokesman.

"NASA has done a lot of work, not only with hurricanes, but with weather in general and global climate change," he said.

The DC-8 was originally flown by Alitalia in the 1960s and purchased by NASA in the early 1980s. It can fly up to 41,000 feet and will allow scientists to study the inner workings of a storm in real time, Brown said.

It is scheduled to arrive in Fort Lauderdale in mid-August, when NASA will commence its Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes, or GRIP, mission.

The other two planes include a WB-57 high altitude jet, which will be based in Houston; and unmanned Global Hawk, which will be based in Palmdale, Calif.

The WB-57, a converted light bomber originally designed by the British in the 1950s, can fly up to 60,000 feet.

The Global Hawk is a 13-ton jet normally used by the U.S. Air Force and Navy to fly surveillance missions. Able to fly up to 65,000 feet and up to 10,000 miles, it will be piloted remotely from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

"The advantage of the Global Hawk is you don't put pilots at risk, if you get into a situation," Brown said. He added that the plane can stay aloft for more than 20 hours at a time, "and you can't do that with an aircraft with a pilot onboard."

Ramesh Kakar, a NASA scientist working on the GRIP program, said by monitoring a storm for long periods of time, researchers will gain valuable insight into how hurricanes work.

"This is really going to be a game-changing hurricane experiment," he said. "For the first time, scientists will be able to study these storms and the conditions that produce them for up to 20 hours straight."

[Over my head]

Cool. Hopefully you guys will be able to get access to that info just like the hurricane hunters we have now.

ooooooooo maybe we'll get some NASA peeps on S2K too!

[AJC3]

Locking this topic as there is already a thread about it.

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=108499