Global Hawk Arrives at Wallops for SHOUT Duty
Photo: NOAA.
One of NASA’s Global Hawk unmanned aircraft has arrived at Wallops Island, Virginia, where it will begin a new mission to improve hurricane forecasts.
The vehicle landed Saturday, Aug. 22 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, where it will kick off the Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology, or SHOUT, program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
SHOUT builds off earlier work led by NASA and will move the Global Hawk closer to being put into operational use as a weather forecast observation tool, according to NOAA.
“We’re flying the Global Hawk above hurricanes and other severe storms to refine it as a new, powerful tool with the potential to contribute to better forecasts of where hurricanes go and how intense they are,” says Robbie Hood, director of NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System Program. "The mission is part of NOAA’s work to improve our nation’s preparedness and resilience to hurricanes and other severe storms.”
Through the end of September, NOAA, NASA and other partners will fly the Global Hawk over the Atlantic Ocean to collect data on temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction. That data will feed into the National Weather Service forecast models used by the National Hurricane Center.
“The Global Hawk allows us to stay over these weather patterns a greater amount of time than manned aircraft,” says Gary Wick, NOAA’s lead scientist for the mission. “It provides us with an observing tool that has the endurance of a satellite but provides finer resolution data and the precision of an aircraft.”
The Global Hawk — the sixth one ever built — is equipped with various instruments, including dropsondes, a radar that can measure precipitation and wind speed, a microwave sounder that takes vertical profiles of temperature and humidity, and a NASA lightning instrument that measures the electric field of thunderstorms.
This season, scientists will also test whether the data from the Global Hawk can help replace data collected by satellites should a satellite go down, which is considered unlikely.
NASA and NOAA have cooperated on using the Global Hawks for studying the weather for years, flying from their West Coast home to Wallops Island for hurricane season. NASA has two Global Hawks, but the other one — the first Global Hawk ever built — has had technical issues in recent years and hasn’t been used as much.
SHOUT is funded in part by the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013, passed by Congress in the wake of the devastating Superstorm Sandy.
