NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission: The HIRAD instrument

This is an artist's concept of aircraft with HIRAD scanning a tropical cyclone. 

Credit: NASA

The Hurricane Imaging Radiometer, known as HIRAD, will fly aboard one of two unmanned (UAV) Global Hawk aircraft during NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission from Wallops beginning August 26 through September 29.

One of the NASA Global Hawks will cover the storm environment and the other will analyze inner-storm conditions.

HIRAD will fly aboard the inner-storm Global Hawk and will be positioned at the bottom, rear section of the aircraft.

"HIRAD's purpose is to map out where the strongest winds are in a hurricane. During its first deployment in 2010 for the GRIP airborne campaign, HIRAD had two interesting hurricane cases, Earl and Karl," said Daniel J. Cecil, the principal investigator for the HIRAD instrument at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama.

"We have made improvements to the instrument since then, and are looking forward to the next good case, out over water, avoiding land of course!"

What is NASA's HS3 mission?
NASA's HS3 mission is a collaborative effort that brings together several NASA centers with federal and university partners to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin.

What is HIRAD?
HIRAD is a passive microwave radiometer that was developed at NASA Marshall.

A radiometer is an instrument used to measure the power of electromagnetic radiation.

Because HIRADis a passive microwave radiometer it detects microwave radiation naturally emitted by Earth.

The radiation HIRAD detects is then used to infer wind speed at the surface of an ocean.

The antenna on HIRAD makes measurements of microwaves emitted by the ocean surface that are increased by the storm. As winds move across the surface of the sea they generate white, frothy foam.

This sea foam causes the ocean surface to emit increasingly large amounts of microwave radiation, similar in frequency or wavelength, but much lower intensity, to that generated within a typical home microwave oven.

HIRAD measures that microwave energy and, in doing so, allows scientists to deduce how powerfully the wind is blowing.

With HIRAD's unique capabilities, the two-dimensional structure of the surface wind speed field can be much more accurately determined than current operational capabilities allow.

What information does HIRAD provide?
HIRAD provides unique observations of sea surface wind speed, temperature and rain. The data HIRAD gathers will advance understanding and predictability of hurricane intensity.

HIRAD's data will also help better determine maximum wind speed and structure of the vortex (spinning center). The region of strongest winds are also much better observed with HIRAD than current capabilities.

Germany cancels 'Euro Hawk' drone programme

Germany has cancelled a planned 'Euro Hawk' drone programme fearing European authorities will not certify them, a defence ministry source said Tuesday after reported European safety concerns.

Thomas de Maiziere

Germany had "no hope" of seeing the unmanned aircraft, part of a programme that would have cost more than one billion euros ($1.3 billion), approved for use, said the source speaking on condition of anonymity.

The European Aviation Safety Agency has said it would only certify the drones to fly over unpopulated areas because of a lack of an anti-collision system to protect airliners, according to German press reports.

"The equipment is not ready for approval without immense expenditure," the source added.

Germany has already spent 508 million euros on a Euro Hawk prototype and was due to fork out a further 500 million on four more models.

The Euro Hawk is a version of the American Global Hawk produced by Northrop Grumman and re-modelled by the European defence and aerospace company EADS.

Berlin has also already spent 40 million euros on modernising the northern Jagel air base where the reconnaissance drones would have been based.

Northrop Grumman also did not want to provide technical documents necessary for the certification process, German press reports said.

In 2011, one year later than planned, the prototype Euro Hawk arrived at the Manching base near Munich in southern Germany.

Germany is in talks with Israel on buying Heron TP drones but German Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere has indicated that any purchase would not take place ahead of September 22 elections, according to German news reports.

Heron TP-2

NASA Drone: Global Hawk Aircraft

This image captures a perspective of NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft from one of the wings.

The Global Hawk is sitting at the aircraft hangar of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va. on Sept. 7, 2012.

The month-long Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3), which began in early September, is currently deploying one instrument-laden Global Hawk from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore to look at the environment of tropical storms.

In 2013 and 2014, a second Global Hawk will be added that will focus on getting detailed measurements of the inner core of hurricanes.

The Global Hawk's ability to fly for a much longer period of time than manned aircraft will allow it to obtain previously difficult-to-get data.

Scientists hope to use that data to gain new insights into how tropical storms form, and more importantly, how they intensify into major Atlantic hurricanes — information that forecasters need to make better storm predictions, save lives, and ultimately prevent costly coastal evacuations if a storm doesn't warrant them.

Image Credit: NASA

Global Hawk

Ready for its closeup: The first demilitarized Global Hawk debuts in 2009 at NASA’s Dryden center in California, where scientists will use it to study hurricanes, pollution, and other atmospheric disturbances.

"That's Professor Global Hawk" | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine

On an April morning last year beneath a bright desert sky, officials at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California unveiled their newest tool for studying the atmosphere: a Global Hawk. In fact, it was the very first Global Hawk, produced in 1998 as a demonstrator to show the capabilities of the unmanned military airplane.

Originally developed to provide field commanders with high-resolution surveillance imagery and produced by Northrop Grumman, Global Hawks fly high and long. They reach altitudes of 65,000 feet, and can surpass 30 hours and 11,000 nautical miles in a single flight.

For Earth scientists, loading a Global Hawk up with sampling gear and sending it into the stratosphere suggests intriguing applications: measuring levels of pollutants and greenhouse gases like ozone; studying the formation of hurricanes and the shrinkage of ice sheets; monitoring the effects of natural disasters.

“Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Air Force have proved that you can use this plane to do reconnaissance,” says NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman, who helped oversee Global Hawk’s first climate research mission. “Well, science is just a different kind of reconnaissance.”

The Global Hawk is no diminutive drone—its slender wings span 116 feet, and its V-tail reaches 15 feet high. With its white paint job, snub nose, humped radome, and single Rolls-Royce AE-3007H turbofan engine, the Global Hawk cuts a figure both elegant and strange; its profile gives the vague impression of a beluga wearing a jetpack.

Global Hawks are well established as military aircraft: The Air Force has deployed them since 2001; 30 have been built and 26 remain operational. But last April marked the first time a Global Hawk had been used for Earth science.

As scientists and NASA officials gathered inside a Dryden hangar to admire Air Vehicle-1, the first Global Hawk made, its sister airplane, AV-6, was heading up the Pacific Northwest coast on a 24-hour tour, one of five flights planned as part of the Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) mission, a joint effort between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to demonstrate the aircraft’s scientific utility.

NASA - Global Hawk Aircraft and Instruments

Global Hawk Instruments

Global Hawk, with instruments labeled.

Global Hawk Dropsonde
The Global Hawk dropsonde is a miniaturized version of standard RD-93 dropsondes based largely on recent MIST driftsondes deployed from balloons.

The dropsonde provides vertical profiles of pressure, temperature, humidity, and winds. Data from these sondes are transmitted in near real-time via Iridium or Ku-band satellite to the ground-station, where additional processing will be performed for transmission of the data via the Global Telecommunications System (GTS) for research and operational use.
For more information

HAMSR (High Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer)
The High Altitude monolithic microwave integrated Circuit (MMIC) Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR) is a microwave atmospheric sounder developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. under the NASA Instrument Incubator Program.

Operating with 25 spectral channels in 3 bands ( 50-60Ghz, 118 Ghz 183 HGz region), features it provides measurements that can be used to infer the 3-D distribution of temperature, water vapor, and cloud liquid water in the atmosphere, even in the presence of clouds.

The new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV-)HAMSR with 183GHz LNA receiver reduces noise to less than a 0.1K level improving observations of small-scale water vapor. HAMSR is mounted in payload zone 3 near the nose of the Global Hawk.
For more information

HIWRAP (High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler)
HIWRAP (High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler) is a dual-frequency radar (Ka- and Ku-band), dual-beam (300 and 400 incidence angle), conical scan, solid-state transmitter-based system, designed for operation on the high-altitude (20 km) Global Hawk UAV.

HIWRAP characteristics: Conically scanning; Simultaneous Ku/Ka-band & two beams @30 and 40 deg; Winds using precipitation & clouds as tracers; Ocean vector wind scatterometry; Map the 3-dimensional winds and precipitation within hurricanes and other severe weather events; Map ocean surface winds in clear to light rain regions using scatterometry.
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LIP (Lightning Instrument Package)
The LIP (Lightning Instrument Package) measures lightning, electric fields, electric field changes, air conductivity. LIP provides real time electric field data for science and operations support.

The LIP is comprised of a set of optical and electrical sensors with a wide range of temporal, spatial, and spectral resolution to observe lightning and investigate electrical environments within and above thunderstorms.

The instruments provide measurements of the air conductivity and vertical electric field above thunderstorms and provide estimates of the storm electric currents. In addition, LIP will detect total storm lightning and differentiate between intracloud and cloud-to-ground discharges.This data is used in studies of lightning/storm structure and lightning precipitation relationships.
For more information