Scientists from NASA have just wrapped up a mission to better understand how hurricanes form, rapidly intensify and dissipate. While the 2010 hurricane season has been a relatively quiet one for coastal areas of the United States, this hasn’t been the case for the entire tropical Atlantic basin. That’s good news for mission scientists who were able to capture valuable information, especially from Hurricanes Earl and Karl. The experiment was called Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes, or GRIP for short.
GRIP used two types of aircraft to cris cross over active tropical storms and hurricanes, gathering data using different instruments. One of the aircraft, a Global Hawk, is an unmanned drone airplane. This particular plane was operated out of the Dryden Flight Research Center, near Palmdale, California. You may recall the 174th Fighter Wing in Syracuse recently began flying another type of drone aircraft, the MQ-9 Reaper. You can read more about that on this previous story. The advantage of the unmanned flight is that they were able to fly over a hurricane for 13 hours straight, something researchers have never been able to do before with traditional aircraft and personnel.
Now that the hurricane season is nearing its’ end, mission scientists are looking over the data collected to see what can be learned. Some of the results may take years to find. Ultimately experiment leaders are looking to better understand how hurricanes operate, so in the end money, and more importantly lives, can be saved. You can find more the complete story at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website.
