During this Atlantic summer hurricane season, NASA plans to widen its tropical storm studies with the addition of two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft ideal for flying over storms and monitoring the conditions under which they form and intensify.

The effort is part of NASA’s Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (or HS3) mission, a collaboration of multiple NASA centers and federal and university partners. The program, in its third year of study in the Atlantic Ocean, will send the two Global Hawks to collect data with six instruments to measure temperature, precipitation, humidity, and surface winds. One aircraft will monitor the environment around the storms, and the second will focus on the storm interior. The flights will take place between August 26 and September 29, during the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season.

At the same time, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will launch surface wind measurement instruments to the International Space Station to better measure ocean surface winds in the tropics and mid-latitudes to improve forecasting.

The HS3 mission is part of NASA’s continuous work in studying weather processes on Earth and providing necessary information to understand and protect both local populations and the planet.

Sources: NASA, NOAA, Science Daily