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EMILY SCHALLER: Hi, my name is Dr. Emily Schaller
and I'm here at NASA Wallops Flight Facility
on the eastern shore of Virginia.
We're here because NASA is using airplanes to study hurricanes.
The mission is called HS3
which stands for the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel.
What's a severe storm sentinel?
It's actually a remotely controlled airplane
called the Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV.
Pilots fly the plane from a cockpit on the ground.
NASA is using these Global Hawks to study hurricanes
in the Atlantic Ocean by flying over and around them.
The global hawk can fly for very long periods of time
at very high altitudes.
It can fly almost twice as high as a commercial jet
and it can fly for over 24 hours without stopping.
That's why scientists are using the Global Hawk
for the HS3 mission,
so they can continuously study storms as they develop.
Forecasters have a pretty good idea of where these storms go,
but what they want to know is, will they grow?
We spoke with NASA mission scientists
about how the Global Hawk will help improve
their understanding of hurricane formation and growth
and why it's so important for us to learn more about hurricanes.
SCOTT BRAUN: The Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel has a goal
to try to better understand the processes that control
the intensity of storms.
The ability to predict the intensity is very important
because it impacts people in the coastal zone.
If they're anticipating, say, a tropical storm,
a Category 1 storm,
and they end up getting a Category 3 storm,
then it makes a big difference in terms of their ability
to prepare and deal with the storm consequences.
PAUL NEWMAN: And this is really important because
the category of a hurricane is the intensity of the winds
associated with a hurricane.
So a Category 5 hurricane is much more destructive
than a Category 1
So being able to predict the difference between
just a tropical storm, a Category 1
up to a Category 5 is really, really crucial
to saving lives
and lessening damage and so forth.
Particularly saving lives.
JANEL THOMAS: The benefit of HS3
compared to any other hurricane mission
is the fact that we have these planes
able to fly upwards of 24 hours
and being able to monitor a storm
for that long period of time and getting constant data,
we can actually catch changes in the storm.
PAUL NEWMAN: We will use two Global Hawks.
One Global Hawk flies over vast areas around a hurricane.
It measures the environment that a hurricane is embedded in.
And then the second Global Hawk,
Instead of sampling the vast area, it goes right in
to look at the eye and the eyewall
in the inner core processes of a hurricane.
EMILY SCHALLER: The Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicles flown by NASA
were originally built for the military
and used for flight testing
at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
When the Air Force was done testing these models,
they were transferred to NASA,
which turned the planes into airborne laboratories
to study the Earth.
NASA flew its first science mission
with a Global Hawk in 2010.
SCOTT BRAUN: The Global Hawks are really a new aircraft
for doing hurricane studies.
Manned aircraft typically fly for, say, eight to ten hours
when they do a research flight.
Of that eight to ten hours, you may have four hours or more
just getting to and from the storm.
So that in a typical flight, you only get four to six hours
actually sampling within the storm.
But, with the Global Hawk, we can get three times,
sometimes even four times
as much as you can get with manned aircraft.
PAUL NEWMAN: Now, this plane can fly to 65,000 feet.
It can fly 13 miles up.
It can also fly for nearly 30 hours.
So this plane can take off here, from Virginia,
on the coastline of Virginia, close to where hurricanes form.
It can fly all the way to Africa.
It can spend about ten hours on the coastline of Africa
and then fly all the way back.
There is no plane that can do that
in the NASA vehicles that we have.
EMILY SCHALLER: Because the Global Hawk can fly so high for so long,
scientists can study larger areas of the Earth
for longer periods of time
in places where planes with pilots on board
may not be able to reach.
We spoke with pilot Phil Hall about the Global Hawk
and what it's like to fly the plane
without actually being inside it.
PHIL HALL: So the two Global Hawks that were flying for HS3,
Air Vehicle 6 and Air Vehicle 1,
from a pilot perspective, it's a very different aircraft.
We we don't have any rudder pedals or a control yoke,
we actually use a mouse and keyboard.
We actually have a control room on the ground.
We have two of them now.
We have one at Edwards Air Force Base in California
and we have one here at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
So it's basically like a trailer.
It's been specially designed for Global Hawk.
It's full of computer systems that can talk to the aircraft.
So we can connect to the internet
and all the satellite products of lightning,
the storm from satellite images...
We're able to download that almost in real time
and use that to actually navigate the storm.
For the first part of the mission,
we actually fly the aircraft from Wallops
and, once we get about two or three hours into our flight,
we actually transfer control of the airplane
back to Edwards Air Force Base,
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.
It's very different from any other kind of aviation operation
in that we have pilots on both coasts
and we can actually transfer control of the aircraft
during the flight to the other pilots.
And when you have these long missions,
like 26 or 27 hours,
one person can't sit there for the entire flight.
So we actually have three or four shifts of people
that come and go to man this aircraft.
PAUL NEWMAN: Now pilots know how to fly planes
and they can tell the plane where to go.
But how does a pilot actually knows where to go?
You have to have scientific information.
Scientists sit in a separate trailer.
We have computers sitting in front of us.
We bring in satellite information,
we bring in forecast information.
And because weather can change so fast,
they can collect that information, interpret it
and then relay it to the pilots and say,
well, instead of going over to this point,
why don't you go over this point over here,
which is where we think the eye has relocated?
So it's a great team
between the scientists and the pilots to actually get
the most information you can out of a flight.
EMILY SCHALLER: How can you become involved in our mission?
You can follow the plane too,
just like the pilots and scientists do
by participating in live chats,
or you can get live updates on where the plane is flying
right from your own classroom.
JANEL THOMAS: You can definitely be a part of our mission by
actually being able to look
at the same screen we're looking at.
I'm looking at where the plane is flying
with respect to the storm
and you have access to the same data I get to look at.
You have access to see the plane's altitude,
You can see the wind speeds, you can see the wind direction
and you can chat live with the pilots,
with forecasters, mission scientists...
And we're looking at the same thing you are.
And that's really exciting to know
that you can ask us any question at any time
and we are right there looking at the same thing.
EMILY SCHALLER: To learn more about our mission
visit: nasa.gov/hs3
See you next time on NASA Airborne!
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