Pictures: Drones Take on Hurricanes, Environment Work

A Global Hawk Turns Hurricane Hunter
Photograph by Reed Saxon, Associated Press
While the American Civil Liberties Union and the Obama Administration duked it out in court last week over the U.S. military’s use of lethal drone strikes in the war on terror, NASA launched its own drone mission in the ongoing battle to understand and predict deadly storms.
An unmanned Global Hawk plane (pictured above) left NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, in Virgina, on September 19. The drone is set to target the eye of Hurricane Nadine, which has been brewing over the Azores and the North Atlantic Ocean for about a week.
This will be the Global Hawk’s third trip into the storm this year—the first of a three-year, 30-million-dollar experiment to use high-altitude, long-distance drones that can “spy,” or collect data, on the evolution of tropical storm intensity.
Unlike more commonly used manned hurricane hunter planes, the Global Hawks, with a wingspan of 116 feet (35 meters) and a jet engine, can stay in the air for up to 30 hours and travel up to 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers).
“We’re getting to areas that you just can’t get to with a manned aircraft,” said Ramesh Kakar, who leads weather research for NASA’s Earth science projects.
And the endurance of the drones means the difference between conducting reconnaissance and surveillance, explained Scott Braun, director of NASA’s new Global Hawk mission. “If you drove by a drug dealer’s house, you wouldn’t catch him; but if you stood there all day, you might.”
The Global Hawk does both recon and longer-term intelligence gathering for the U.S. military.
NASA scientists, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and drone manufacturer Northrop Grumman, hope their efforts to document the entire lifecycle of tropical storms will help refine hurricane prediction and reduce the costs associated with both storm damage and evacuation.
“If we can improve forecasts, we can save money and lives,” Braun said.
(Read more about extreme weather in National Geographic magazine.)
—Tasha Eichenseher
Published September 24, 2012
Tropical Storm Frank
Photograph courtesy of NASA
The use of drones is not new for NASA, which has been employing Global Hawks for severe weather and climate change research since 2009—when the agency finished retrofitting two Global Hawks it inherited from the U.S. Air Force. NASA has used other types of drones for even longer.
But this is the first year a flight has left from the East Coast, allowing for longer Atlantic Ocean missions. Previous flights have been a base in California.
Over the last three years, NASA has studied a host of tropical storms, including Frank (pictured above). (See more hurricane pictures.)
Snapped from above the storm at 60,000 feet (18,000 meters), this image shows a band of thunderclouds around Frank’s center. (Related: “Best Satellite Pictures: Winning ‘Earth as Art’ Shots From NASA.”)
Instruments on the drone clocked winds at around 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour), as Frank made its way across the eastern Pacific Ocean.
With the drone-collected data, NASA hopes to better understand the role thunderstorms and dust wafting from the Sahara play in storm intensification over the Atlantic. The information will also help them calibrate more traditional satellite data, explained Kakar.
The plane is equipped with lasers that scan for temperature, water vapor, and cloud structure and depth, and aerosol or dust levels.
Tiny mobile weather stations the size and shape of paper towel rolls—called dropsondes—parachute some tens of thousands of feet to the ocean surface, collecting temperature, pressure, wind, and humidity measurements as they descend.
(Watch video of a Global Hawk over Hurricane Karl in 2010.)
Published September 24, 2012
Control Center
Photograph courtesy NASA
Data is sent from the drones via satellite to control stations at NASA. The agency then transmits that data so it can be used in computer models by weather forecasters.
Another set of monitors, manned by two pilots, shows typical airplane gauges for altitude, wind speed, fuel, and more.
(Related: Extreme Weather Photos.)
“With unmanned aircraft you have to negotiate how you’re going to operate with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and in commercial air space,” said Kent Fuller, one of the pilots for the Nadine mission and a former Air Force and commercial pilot.
FAA approval is required for any unmanned aircraft, according to Mike Hutt, project manager for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) office, which has started using smaller drones for its own environmental missions.
Launching and landing a Global Hawk over commercial air space requires a manned “chase” plane that can serve as the eyes of the drone as it charts a flight path through a sometimes crowded atmosphere. The chase plane isn’t needed once the Hawk reaches higher, traffic-free altitudes.
Published September 24, 2012
Lake Reconnaissance
Photograph by Erin Clark
The use of drones for environmental research has taken off around the country.
While NASA brings in the big guns for its hurricane missions, other federal and state agencies and private companies are using smaller models for everything from estimating sandhill crane populations in Colorado to monitoring volcanic activity in Hawaii.
A USGS scientist launches a Raven drone over Upper Red Rock Lake in Montana in the above picture. A thermal camera on the remote-control glider was used to identify the location of underwater springs that could help fish survive through winter.
With a 4.5-foot (1.2-meter) wingspan and battery-operated motor, the Raven can stay in the air for up to 90 minutes and reach an altitude of 1,000 feet (305 meters).
“These small, inexpensive UASs (unmanned aircraft systems) put the tools in the hands of the land managers at the local level and supplement or replace satellites and manned aircraft,” explained USGS’s Hutt.
“The technology also helps us become more cost effective in doing what we do.”
The sandhill crane project would have cost close to $30,000 with a manned flight; using the Raven lowered the cost to about $3,000, he said.
“We can thank the Department of Defense, which has spent billions of dollars over the past five to ten years developing the technology,” said Hutt. “It has just become available for commercial and civil use in the last three years.”
Published September 24, 2012
Fighting Fire With Drones
Photograph by Jim Ross, NASA
An unmanned aircraft called the Ikhana flies over Lake Arrowhead, California, during the 2007 wildfire season.
NASA uses this unmanned vessel—slightly less powerful than the Global Hawk with a wingspan of 66 feet (20 meters) and a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet (12,000 meters)—primarily for documenting the extent of and damage from forest fires.
The Ikhana is a drone model called a Predator B—a military prototype that has been modified for civilian and environmental missions.
Later versions of the Predator have been used for drone strikes over Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Published September 24, 2012
Your Own Private Drone
Photograph by Wilfredo Lee, Associated Press
NOAA scientist Joseph Cione poses with an Aerosonde Mark 3—a drone produced by an Australian aeronautics company.
There are probably thousands of small businesses now involved, beyond the military, in drone design and production, estimates USGS’s Hutt. “There is a new one every day.”
And new FAA rules may soon require even drone hobbyists who use unmanned aircraft for any business purposes—from journalism to real-estate scouting—to get flight authorization. (Related: “Albatross's Effortless Flight Decoded—May Influence Future Planes.”)
NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems program uses drones like the Raven to survey marine mammal populations.
In May it launched an Aeryon Scout and a Ario Vironment Puma AE, both equipped with cameras, to monitor stellar sea lions off of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
The Scout, which can fly for up to 25 minutes, operates like a small battery-powered helicopter and the Puma is a glider with a 10-foot (three-meter) wingspan that can sustain flights of up to two hours.
“Unmanned aircraft can fly lower and slower than manned aircraft and are much quieter, enabling researchers to observe animals at relatively close range with minimal disturbance,” NOAA stated in a press release about the project.
Published September 24, 2012
Drone Launch
Photo courtesy of USGS
USGS scientists and the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe Environmental Protection Office launch a drone in August over the Missouri River.
Images from this flight, along a seven-mile (11-kilometer) stretch of river, will be compared to data from a flight last year to help the tribe measure erosion. By some estimates, the reservation is losing up to eight feet (2.4 meters) of shoreline a year.
“Results from this effort will be analyzed to investigate the location and severity of erosion, and the lasting impacts of cultural and environmental losses,” said USGS scientist Kathy Neitzert in a press release about the project. “The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe will use the results to gather highly accurate baseline data on the shoreline.”
With more readily available data and less expensive monitoring equipment, land managers, along with weather researchers, say that drones are the future of environmental management.
“This is the way we will do science in the future,” NASA’s Braun told National Geographic News.
Published September 24, 2012