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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, October 26, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Scott Braun

zquot;Peering into the Storm: Using the Unmanned Global Hawk to Decipher the Mysteries of Hurricanes"

ABSTRACT -- NASA has conducted numerous hurricane field campaigns going back to 1998 to examine the formation of storms, the organization of rainfall and winds, and the complex processes that lead to hurricane intensification. Most of these campaigns used the NASA DC-8 and ER-2, but were necessarily restricted to storms that came within range of the aircraft, thereby greatly limiting the length of time over the storms. Small Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs), known as Aerosondes, were used in several years, but provided very limited range and only low-level in-situ measurements of temperature, humidity, and winds. In 2010, NASA brought out a "game changer" for hurricane measurements, the high-altitude long-endurance Global Hawk, capable of flights of 26 hours, altitudes of over 55,000 ft, and payload capacity for large remote sensing instruments. This presentation will focus on some of the successes and challenges of using the Global Hawk during the 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) and the 2012-2014 Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) missions, with highlights of some of the major science results.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Scott A. Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, was the project scientist for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite from 2008-2015. He is also the principal investigator for NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission, a five-year mission using NASA’s Global Hawk aircraft to investigate Atlantic hurricanes. He also participated in several hurricane field campaigns, including the Convection and Moisture Experiment (CAMEX-3, 1998), the Tropical Cloud Systems and Processes (TCSP, 2005) experiment, and the Genesis and Rapid Intensification (GRIP, 2010) experiment. He has a doctorate in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a bachelor's degree in meteorology from San Francisco State University.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov