Hawker

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has partnered with Nasa to study El Niño and its impact on the weather system.

Under the collaboration, Nasa’s remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft will be flown over the Pacific to collect El Niño storm data.

It will collect data about storms that originated from El Niño, which is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and is related to warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including off the Pacific coast of South America.

The initiative is part of an existing NOAA mission, known as Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT), under which Global Hawk aircraft will perform a series of flights in February.

With the SHOUT mission, NOAA aims to confirm the use of self-directed aircraft to bridge data gaps for weather modelling systems if a polar-orbiting satellite happens to fail.

SHOUT expects to provide help for NOAA’s greater El Niño rapid response field campaign.

Besides Global Hawk, the US scientific agency plans to use a Gulfstream IV research plane and NOAA Ship Ronald H Brown in the mission, with researchers based on Kiritimati (Christmas) Island in the Republic of Kiribati, 1,340m south of Honolulu.

"With the aircraft’s long endurance, we can sample a large range of the ocean, much like a satellite does but in much greater detail."

The Global Hawk aircraft can fly at an altitude of 65,000ft for up to 30 hours. With the plane, scientists at NOAA expect to understand how atmospheric changes in the tropics are directly impacting weather activity in the western parts of the US.

NOAA scientist Gary Wick said: "The Global Hawk provides amazing capability in its ability to be airborne for 24 hours or more.

"With the aircraft’s long endurance, we can sample a large range of the ocean, much like a satellite does but in much greater detail."

During its flight, Global Hawk will carry a set of four instruments including small tube-shaped sensors known as dropsondes.

The dropsonde system, which is called the airborne vertical atmospheric profiling system (AVAPS) will be deployed from the aircraft in flight to transmit real-time data on air temperature, humidity, and wind speed.

The high altitude imaging wind and rain airborne profiler (HIWRAP) instruments and high altitude MMIC sounding radiometer (HAMSR), to be carried by Global Hawk, will be operated and managed by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory respectively.

Both instruments will gather remote observations of the area and expect to provide data similar to satellite observations. The other instrument, NOAA-O3, will calculate ozone at the level where the aircraft is located.

Image: Nasa’s remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft. Photo: courtesy of Nasa / Jim Ross.