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NASA has released new footage of their Global Hawk drones flying low over the cloud-tops of Hurricane Edouard, to capture the raging storm's eye. Check it out!

NASA's Global Hawk gives a drone's-eye view of flying over a raging hurricane


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Wednesday, October 1, 2014, 12:43 PM - Satellites may provide us with some amazing shots of hurricanes, but, as seen above, NASA's Global Hawk drones can give us a view unlike any other, as they skim above the cloud-tops of these impressive storms.

The footage in the video shows two passes over Edouard's eye. The first, shot during the afternoon of Sept 14 (between 20:48 and 21:12 UTC), gives the daytime, full-colour camera view of the rolling 'cloudscape' and the structure of the hurricane's eye. The second pass was shot roughly five and a half hours later (between 2:07 and 2:30 UTC Sept 15), and shows a black-and-white, lowlight view of the moon hanging over the hauntingly tranquil scene of the storm top. The pause during each pass is a simple freeze-frame to show off Eduoard's eye.

Global Hawk drone. Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas.

At the time, Edouard was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, swirling away as a Category 1 Hurricane, with sustained wind speeds of around 140 km/h, and this was just hours before it intensified into a Category 2 storm. The storm went on to become a Category 3 hurricane before it dissipated. That made it the first (and only, so far) major hurricane of the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season, and the first major hurricane in the Atlantic since Sandy in 2012.

Although it never came near landfall, NASA still used Edouard as an opportunity to get in some study time on these potentially dangerous storms, launching two of its Global Hawk drones (pictured to the right) to fly over it and drop instruments known as 'dropsondes' down into the storm. A dropsonde is essentially like a weather balloon, but with the balloon swapped out for a specially designed parachute. Dropping one down through Edouard's eyewall, from cloud-tops to water's surface, early in the morning on Sept 17 (when the storm was back down to Category 1 strength), it returned the 'profile' of the storm seen below.


Credit: NASA

The graph shows temperature (thick red line, in Celsius) and dewpoint temperature (thick blue line, in Celsius), from a height of about 15 kilometres up, down to the surface of the water. The closer those two lines are, the higher the humidity, and the more cloud there will be. The point where it shows only blue, from just below the 700 mb line, is where the two lines are actually overlapping (near or at 100 per cent humidity). Along the right hand side of the graph are wind speeds, shown as wind barbs. Reading each like it's an arrow - with the dot being the 'head' and the barbs being the 'fletching' - the wind is said to be flowing from the direction the arrow is flying from, so the bottom-most barb shows a wind direction of South Southwest. For the fletching, a short staff is 5 knots, a long staff is 10 knots and a triangle is 50 knots. Referencing that same bottom-most barb, it has a wind speed of around 85 knots (157 km/h).

According to a NASA news release, "the dropsonde, along with 87 others during this flight, provided readings from top to bottom of the critical region of the atmosphere, giving scientists a perfect view of winds, temperature and pressure throughout the whole depth of the storm."

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