NASA To Fly Into Hurricane Research This Summer

WASHINGTON -- 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.

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 being 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 will
provide cloud profiles of storms, which include altitude,
temperatures and rainfall intensity.

Several instruments onboard NASA's Aqua satellite 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.

"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."

Several NASA field centers are involved in the mission including
Goddard, Johnson, Dryden, the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field,
Calif., Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, 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 information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Source: NASA