NASA Global Hawk
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists are using NASA’s Global Hawk to study atmospheric rivers in the sky during the Winter Storms and Pacific Atmospheric Rivers, or WISPAR, field campaign slated that began on February 11th.
The focus of the research is to improve our understanding of how atmospheric rivers form and behave, and to evaluate the operational use of unmanned aircraft for investigating these phenomena.
NASA’s Global Hawk, which is operated by NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California, will be equipped with sensors including an advanced water vapor sensor — the high-altitude monolithic microwave integrated circuit sounding radiometer, or HAMSR — created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and a new dropsonde funded by NOAA and developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The drop-sondes will be launched from the Global Hawk and take temperature, wind and other readings as they descend through an AR
Read the full story here on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agency’s web-site.