A pair of converted US military drones are NASA’s newest tools for tracking hurricanes and tropical storms, with the aim of improving forecasters’ ability to predict them.
Originally built for military reconnaissance missions around the world, they are the size of large commercial jets and are flown remotely from a Wallops Island, a NASA base on Virginia’s coast.
The drones are capable of flying for 30 hours at an altitude of 21,000m, or twice the height of a passenger plane.
The two Global Hawks began operating as drones for the US space agency last year as part of a three-year-long project called HS3 — which stands for the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel.
“It opens a window into a storm we did not have before,” said Scott Braun, a research meteorologist on the project. “Before, we had short snap shots of individual storms at various times.”
Until now, the stand-bys for monitoring storms have been piloted weather planes and satellites, Braun said.
“By being able to view a storm continuously over a 20-hour period, you have a longer window to capture it,” he added. “This experiment will allow a better understanding of the processes that govern the intensification in the formation of storms.”
Even though scientists have been able to make great leaps in projecting the paths of hurricanes in recent years, their ability to predict the power and severity of storms has improved very little.
Better forecasts would help authorities make life and death decisions, like whether and when to evacuate people, more swiftly.
The drones have two chief missions: determine the role of thunderstorms and rain in the intensification of storms, and study the influence of the Saharan Air Layer in the intensity of cyclones.
Each of the planes is equipped with a laser for studying the structure of the clouds, a microwave system to probe the heart of hurricanes, GPS systems and radar, among other things.
Their precision instruments measure temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure several times per second. The drones send the data via satellite to the Wallops base and then to the US National Hurricane Center, where they can be distributed to weather forecasters across the US in near real-time.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
RSS