Tiny UAV Does Yeoman's Duty

NASA and NOAA are testing what they call Aerosondes -- tiny unmanned aircraft that can be launched from a pick-up truck. They're designed to monitor temperature, humidity and wind velocity in hurricanes long before they get close to shore.

But these UAVs are designed to go where manned hurricane hunters can't -- just a few thousand feet above the ocean surface. That's in the harshest part of the storm.

These tiny aircraft carry all of the sophisticated instruments used in traditional hurricane observations, including GPS and a satellite communications system that relays all the information in real-time. Additionally, they utilize an infrared sensor used to estimate the underlying sea surface temperature.

According to NewScientist.com, each Aerosonde costs about $50,000. They can fly for 18 hours below 1000 ft carrying around 10 lbs of instruments and communication gear.

"The concept of the Aerosonde as a small, robust unmanned autonomous vehicle, or UAV, arose directly from our need for observations in dangerous areas such as the hurricane surface layer," said Greg Holland, president of Aerosonde North America and one of the Aerosonde originators.

Up until now, hurricane hunters have used dropsondes. But they go straight down into the water and provide spotty coverage of low-level hurricane conditions at best.

"It's been a long road to get to this point, but it was well worth the wait," said Joe Cione, NOAA hurricane researcher at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorology Laboratory (AOML) in Miami and the lead scientist on this project. "If we want to improve future forecasts of hurricane intensity change we will need to get continuous low-level observations near the air-sea interface on a regular basis."

The environment near the surface is critically important to researchers -- it's where the sea's energy, in the form of heat, is transferred to the storm. It's also where the most powerful winds occur. Both of these data points will give scientists much-needed real-time information to help them understand why some of these storms intensify so quickly.

FMI: www.noaa.gov, www.nasa.gov