Re: Track of Global Hawk as of 12:07am EDT
Posted by
Chris in Tampa on 8/30/2016, 1:09 am
They drop lots of dropsondes from a very high altitude (55,000 to 65,000 feet!) and also have other equipment onboard whose data can be viewed here (although it is not loading for me at the moment):
http://uas.noaa.gov/shout/viz/?active=avaps
About sondes from Global Hawk:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/psd2/coastal/satres/ghawk_dropsonde.html
About some of the other equipment onboard, which can be viewed in that display above:
HAMSR: https://microwavescience.jpl.nasa.gov/instruments/hamsr/
HIWRAP: http://har.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.php?section=13
This is a research mission they are doing right now as part of the NOAA SHOUT Project (Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology):
http://uas.noaa.gov/shout/
A dropsonde will gather data constantly, such as pressure, temperature and wind, from the time the sonde is released from the aircraft to when it falls to the ground. This data can be fed into the models which may improve them. This could help the models get the correct height of pressures, which affects the steering of storms. It could tell you where the dry air is ahead of the storm if the aircraft samples there. It can tell you what shear might exist at a particular level, and the direction it is coming from. The height of the Global Hawk is very high, so flight level data is not as important. But it gets so much data on the way down. The NOAA flight level on the last flight dropped sondes from around 10,000 feet. And the Global Hawk sometimes drops a ton of sondes, like around 50 to 90, often around 70 to 80. That's a lot of data compared to other recon mission by the Air Force and NOAA P-3's. The Global Hawk is kind of like the NOAA G-IV jet, sampling around storms, though at a lower altitude (around 40,000 feet on another mission, which is high enough to sample above the 200mb level), trying to feed that data into the models. Otherwise, the models rely on indirect measurements perhaps by satellite, unless there are other surface observations or balloon launches for example. (I don't know to what extent, if any, that velocity data from radar sites enter into models, but that too is kind of an estimate) But this is a direct measure.
They will travel all around the storm, ahead of it, so that the path of the storm can be a little more clear hopefully. They are doing research so they might have other goals too. There are other instruments onboard that they might want to use on the storm itself, rather than just around the storm. This aircraft flies so high, it could fly over a powerful hurricane and not be impacted like the NOAA P-3's and Air Force WC-130J's that fly directly into the clouds at lower levels. |
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