From Jim Wayner and the Florida Today website:
The Global Hawk, set to make its maiden voyage high above a hurricane this month, can stay aloft much longer than manned flights and fill vital data gaps that forecasters need to predict whether storms will strengthen into hurricanes.
Scientists liken the drone to a roving low-orbit satellite that will give unprecedented glimpses inside storms. It can fly about twice as high as a commercial airliner and scan an area the size of Illinois in only 24 hours.
"We can hardly hide our excitement," said Ramesh Kakar, a program scientist at NASA in Washington, D.C. "We can learn a lot from this sustained look."
While expensive -- the drone alone is about $35 million, not including support systems and payload -- researchers say Global Hawk should pay off in hurricane damage averted through earlier, more accurate warnings about storm intensity. That's considered the holy grail of hurricane research.
"Our forecasts of where the hurricane is going to go has improved significantly," said Scott Spratt, a National Weather Service forecaster in Melbourne. "But as far as the intensity, there's been very little improvement year to year."
The drone is among three NASA aircraft that will give real-time, sustained views of budding hurricanes. NASA is pumping $4 million this year into the project, called the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP), and also plans to fund instrument development and data analysis later. About $1.3 million of this year's money is for the Global Hawk portion of the campaign.
Three additional aircraft from other federal agencies will fly hurricane missions as well, for as many as six planes probing a single storm at once.
Manned flights typically yield about four hours of data collection for a forming storm, the GRIP researchers said. But Global Hawk is fitted with 3-D radar, a microwave radiometer and other sophisticated instruments that enables them to gather data over tropical systems for up to 20 hours.
