NASA to Fly Into Hurricane Research This Summer

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

Steve Cole 202-358-0918
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Steven.e.cole@nasa.gov

News release: 2010-226 July 7, 2010

NASA to Fly Into Hurricane Research This Summer

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-226&cid=release_2010-226

PASADENA, Calif. – Three NASA aircraft will begin flights to study tropical cyclones on Aug. 15
during the agency's first major U.S.-based hurricane field campaign since 2001. The Genesis and
Rapid Intensification Processes mission, or GRIP, will study the creation and rapid intensification of
hurricanes. Advanced instruments from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., will be
aboard two of the aircraft.

One of the major challenges in tropical cyclone forecasting is knowing when a tropical cyclone is
going to form. Scientists will use the data from this six-week field mission to better understand how
tropical storms form and develop into major hurricanes. Mission scientists will also be looking at how
storms strengthen, weaken and die.

"This is really going to be a game-changing hurricane experiment," said Ramesh Kakar, GRIP program
scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "For the first time, scientists will be able to study
these storms and the conditions that produce them for up to 20 hours straight. GRIP will provide a
sustained, continuous look at hurricane behavior at critical times during their formation and
evolution."

GRIP is led by Kakar and three project scientists: Scott Braun and Gerry Heymsfield of NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Edward Zipser of the University of Utah in Salt
Lake City.

Three NASA satellites will play a key role in supplying data about tropical cyclones during the field
mission. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, managed by both NASA and the Japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency, will provide rainfall estimates and help pinpoint the locations of "hot
towers" or powerhouse thunderstorms in tropical cyclones. The CloudSat spacecraft, developed and
managed by JPL, will provide cloud profiles of storms, which include altitude, temperatures and
rainfall intensity. Several instruments onboard NASA's Aqua satellite, including JPL's Atmospheric
Infrared Sounder (AIRS), will provide infrared, visible and microwave data that reveal such factors
as temperature, air pressure, precipitation, cloud ice content, convection and sea surface temperatures.

The three NASA aircraft taking part in the mission are a DC-8, WB-57 and a remotely piloted Global
Hawk. The DC-8 will fly out of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida. The
WB-57 will be based at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field in Houston. The Global
Hawk will be piloted and based from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, in Palmdale, Calif.,
while flying for up to 20 hours in the vicinity of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

The aircraft will carry a total of 15 instruments, ranging from an advanced microwave sounder to
dropsondes that take measurements as they fall through the atmosphere to the ocean surface. In order
to determine how a tropical cyclone will behave, the instruments will analyze many factors including:
cloud droplet and aerosol concentrations, air temperature, wind speed and direction in storms and on
the ocean's surface, air pressure, humidity, lightning, aerosols, and water vapor. The data also will
validate the observations from space.

The JPL instruments include the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding
Radiometer (HAMSR), flying aboard the Global Hawk; and the Airborne Precipitation Radar (APR-
2), aboard the DC-8. HAMSR is a microwave atmospheric sounder that will be used to infer the 3-D
distribution of temperature, water vapor and cloud liquid water in the atmosphere. It operates even in
the presence of clouds. APR-2 is a dual-frequency weather radar that will take 3-D images of the
precipitation beneath the DC-8 to measure its characteristics. These data will be used to infer rainfall
rates, the location of ice and the speed of air updrafts, all of which are part of the atmospheric
processes that provide a hurricane's energy.

"It was a lot of hard work to assemble the science team and the payload for the three aircraft for
GRIP," Kakar said. "But now that the start of the field experiment is almost here, we can hardly
contain our excitement."

In addition to JPL, several other NASA field centers are involved in the mission, including Goddard;
Johnson; Dryden; the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.; Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Va.; and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Centers provide scientists,
instrument teams, project management or aircraft operations.

GRIP mission planning is being coordinated with two separate hurricane airborne research campaigns
that will be in the field at the same time. The National Science Foundation is sponsoring the PRE-
Depression Investigation of Cloud-systems in the Tropics mission. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration is conducting the Intensity Forecast Experiment 2010. These flights will
be based in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and Tampa, Fla.

For more information about the GRIP field experiment, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grip . For more
on CloudSat, visit: http://cloudsat.atmos.colostate.edu/ . For more on AIRS, see:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/ . For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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