Unmanned Aircraft Flies into Hurricanes

Hurricane forecasters have a new tool for gathering data on growing hurricanes. It's a small, unmanned aircraft named Aerosonde, and it flies into the high-wind environments of hurricanes to observe conditions at the sea surface.

Hurricanes are fueled by warm water evaporating into the air, so understanding the environment where the air meets the water is a critically important in forecasting the intensity of a brewing hurricane. Better understanding of this environment and better analysis of it are two ways researchers hope to improve hurricane forecasting.

The Aerosonde aircraft - a joint project between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA - flew its first 10-hour mission during Hurricane Ophelia. On board the little plane were instruments that allowed it to report temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind speed back to land every half second in real-time.

"It's been a long road to get to this point, but it was well worth the wait," said Joe Cione, a hurricane researcher at the NOAA. "If we want to improve future forecasts of hurricane intensity change we will need to get continuous low-level observations near the air-sea interface on a regular basis, but manned flights near the surface of the ocean are risky. Remote unmanned aircraft such as the Aerosonde are the only way. Today we saw what hopefully will become 'routine' in the very near future."

--Bjorn Carey

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Credit: NASA