This past summer, thirty-two undergraduate students completed a NASA summer internship designed to provide them…
NASA’s 2014 HS3 Hurricane Mission Investigated Four Tropical Cyclones
NASA’s Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel, or HS3, mission investigated four tropical cyclones in the 2014 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season: Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard and Gonzalo. The storms affected land areas in the Atlantic Ocean Basin and were at different stages during the investigations.
The HS3 mission pilots flew a remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft over Cristobal, Dolly, and Edouard and flew a manned WB-57 aircraft over Gonzalo. During the flights, Cristobal transitioned from a hurricane into an extra-tropical storm. Edouard strengthened from a tropical storm into a strong Category-2 hurricane during the Global Hawk fly-overs. Gonzalo was a major Categories 3 and 4 hurricane when NASA’s WB-57 investigated. “Despite forecasts for a below-normal hurricane season, 2014 became our best deployment year of the mission by providing us with four storms, two of which became major hurricanes,” said Dr. Scott Braun, HS3 Mission Principal Investigator from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.The HS3 mission was based out of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, for the third year to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin.
Hurricane Cristobal Became an Extra-Tropical Storm
NASA’s Global Hawk No. 872 aircraft flew over Hurricane Cristobal on Aug. 26 and 27 when it was a Category 1 hurricane northeast of the Bahamas and again on Aug. 28 and 29 when the storm was transitioning into an extra-tropical system. Storms become extra-tropical when the warm air at the storm center is replaced by colder air and the storm begins to resemble a mid-latitude low pressure system…
Image Credit: NASA
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