Advancing Tropical Cyclone Forecasts Using Aircraft Observations - Monitoring and Prediction of Tropical Cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Climate Change - page 182

In the future, NOAA will be working with NASA on the development and
testing of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) such as the Global Hawk (http://
airbornescience.nasa.gov/aircraft/Global_Hawk). In 2010 the Global Hawk
operated in a number of tropical cyclones during NASA's Genesis and Rapid
Intensity Project (GRIP) (http://airbornescience.nsstc.nasa.gov/grip/), which
was conducted coincident with NOAA's IFEX and the NSF-sponsored Pre-
Depression Investigation of Cloud-Systems in the Tropics (PREDICT)
(Montgomery et al., 2012). During these missions the Global Hawk was able
to fly over two hurricanes (Earl and Karl) for more than 15 hours providing an
unprecedented look at the temporal evolution of the storm. Starting in 2012
NASA is planning a five-year effort to further test the Global Hawk in hurricane
environments under the auspices of the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel
(HS3) (http://www.espo.nasa.gov/hs3/) Mission. The NASA Global Hawks
are ideal platforms for investigations of hurricanes, capable of flight altitudes
greater than 55,000 ft and flight durations of up to 30 h. HS3 will utilize two
Global Hawks (Fig. 10), one with an instrument suite geared toward
measurement of the environment and the other with instruments suited to inner-
core structure and processes. Field measurements will take place for one month
each during the hurricane seasons of 2012-2014.
Fig. 10: NASA Global Hawk configurations for the HS3 Mission in 2012—(top)
Environmental Payload (AV-6) @WEF'12 and (above) Over-storm Payload
(AV-1) @ WFF'12.