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Riding the storm

By: David Tortorano

NASA’s Dr. Ramesh Kakar can hardly hide his excitement. Come next hurricane season, he and others who hope to better understand the life-cycle of hurricanes will get an “unprecedented” look at the inner workings of a hurricane.

The NASA experiment is designed not only to help experts better understand which tropical disturbances will develop, but to help them predict which ones will intensify into monsters. The intensity question seems particularly important. There’s little more frightening than seeing a Category 2 hurricane turn into a Category 4 or 5 overnight.

In the 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Process experiment, NASA will use its newly acquired high-flying Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles to spy on storms. The UAVs will give forecasters something they’ve never before had: eyes in the sky that will provide a longer, sustained look at storms as they develop.

NASA’s Dr. Ramesh Kakar

And that’s a big change. Right now, instruments aboard low Earth orbiting satellites can only get a glimpse at hurricanes as they pass over on their fixed orbits. With a Global Hawk, those same cloud-piercing instruments can remain over a hurricane for hours on end, and provide moment by moment data on its development.

“That is unprecedented,” said Kakar, weather focus area leader in the Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. “For the first time — and I find this extremely exciting — with the same satellite instruments we’re going to station ourselves over the area of interest for, in my opinion, between 15 and 20 hours, and see how this disturbance develops into a hurricane and, in some cases, how a hurricane develops further or fizzles out.”

The new tool

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Global Hawk to GRIP.

The Northrop Grumman-built Global Hawk has become a poster child for the new age of unmanned aerial vehicles. The combat-proven, jet-powered Global Hawk is usually associated with warfare, and in fact the prototype was pushed into service during the war in Afghanistan. One of its strongest characteristics is its ability to remain airborne for extended periods of time at altitudes as high as 60,000 feet.

The aircraft is also something of a poster child for the Gulf Coast region. Global Hawk central fuselage work is done at the Northrop Grumman Unmanned Systems Center in Moss Point. The Global Hawk and the Fire Scout unmanned helicopter together are South Mississippi’s calling card into the growing UAV field.

While the Air Force has the longest track record with the Global Hawk, other agencies have since come on board and ordered their own aircraft. The Navy chose the platform for its Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Program, and Germany is getting its own version, EuroHawk, with a European-created payload.

But its importance in civilian applications has been obvious for a long time.

NASA in December 2007 received two Global Hawks from the Air Force, and both are based at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. They are the first and sixth aircraft built under the original DARPA Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program.

Last year when NASA unveiled the new birds with the NASA paint schemes, the agency said the two Global Hawks would be used to support NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and the Earth science community, which require high-altitude, long-endurance, long-distance airborne capability.

Tracking hurricanes was an obvious mission.

Getting a GRIP

Experts know that most of the major hurricanes that hit the United States originate as weather disturbances out of Africa. Kakar said these African Easterly Waves “come like clockwork every three, four days during the hurricane season, essentially from May until October and maybe sometime in November. So we get 60 or 65 of these every year.”

And there are some similarities in these disturbances.

“These are generally associated with thunderstorms, precipitation and wind. When these disturbances organize into a closed circular pattern called a vortex with wind exceeding 39 miles per hour, we get a tropical storm and when these winds exceed 74 miles per hour a hurricane is born,” Kakar said.

And that’s the crux of the matter. They start out similar, but some develop and some don’t. And that’s what it all boils down to: identifying the conditions under which some will become hurricanes, as well as the conditions that cause some to develop more rapidly than others.

“So we do this experiment to first of all identify which one becomes a hurricane and which one just fizzles out. Then once it forms we’re going to see which one rapidly intensifies, which one fizzles out and why. And so that’s basically in a sense our experiment,” Kakar said.

It’s not that the experts have no idea. They certainly do, and there are models that are used that have, according to Kakar, become pretty good. But what is often the case is these models predict more hurricanes will develop than actually do. The question is why.

For Kakar, whose interest and expertise is the development of the satellite instruments, Global Hawk represented intriguing possibilities, most notably the aircraft’s ability to loiter over an area of interest. Imagine parking satellite instruments above the storm.

The Global Hawk role

A Global Hawk will fly only when the team believes the conditions exist that are conducive to the formation of a hurricane. That will be a tricky part. The Global Hawk will take off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, and it will take four to five hours just to get to the East Coast.

Remotely controlled from the other side of the country, the Global Hawk will fly a pattern dictated by the experiment. The length of time it will be able to loiter over the hurricane will depend on how far it has to go to get there. Clearly the idea is to let it stay over the storm as long as possible.

An ideal situation would be to have the Global Hawk already on the East Coast. The team is taking a look at the possibility of mobile launching, perhaps at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“This year will be lean, getting the instruments and the aircraft ready for the big experiment in 2010,” said Kakar, who said about 100 people will be working on the mission. In addition to the Global Hawk, GRIP will also utilize the services of its DC-8.

And NASA isn’t the only one that will be involved. NOAA will fly one or two P-3s into the same storms, and there will be the Hurricane Hunters going inside the eye of the hurricanes, “so we’ll have five or six aircraft in the stack.”

For NASA, Global Hawk is a fairly new platform and Kakar said they will need time to become familiar with the system and to integrate it in the mission. And there’s one other thing – they will need to muster the confidence to fly it over a hurricane.

The future

Kakar feels confident the 2010 season will provide a lot of new data.

“I think the amount of information we’re going to gleen is going to keep the modelers happy for many, many years to come,” he said.

And whether the Global Hawk will have a future in hurricane coverage beyond the 2010 experiment remains to be seen. Kakar sees the Global Hawk as being a transitional platform that could lead to the development of real geostationary satellites dedicated to covering hurricanes.

“That’s exactly how I sold this process,” said Kakar, who said that it would be great to make current low-orbiting satellite instruments available on geostationary platforms of the future that would be able to provide persistent coverage of disturbances as they develop over time.

“Since we do not have them right now, this is the best we can do with the help of the Global Hawk,” Kakar said. “The Global Hawk is kind of my geosynchronist orbit simulator.”

Reprinted from July 2009 issue of Alliance Insight, a quarterly newsletter of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Alliance for Economic Development.

Posted at www.sunherald.com on July 4, 2009

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