Flying Over Hurricanes For New NASA Mission

Released Tuesday, July 25, 2017

ID: 12195

- Produced by:
- Joy Ng
- Visualizations by:
- Alex Kekesi

NASA scientists are investigating key questions about hurricanes in a new mission from the skies. This August, the East Pacific Origins and Characteristics of Hurricanes, or EPOCH, mission will fly over East Pacific storms to better understand how they form and intensify. EPOCH will conduct up to six 24-hour science flights using the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft. Three of the flights are being supported through a partnership with the NOAA UAS Program. Data will be collected using three instruments (EXRAD, HAMSR, and AVAPS) aboard the aircraft that will map out the 3-D patterns of temperature, pressure, humidity, precipitation, and wind speed - key factors that influence hurricane behavior. NASA scientists use a combination of ground, modeled, and satellite data to re-create multi-dimensional pictures of hurricanes and other major storms in order to study complex atmospheric interactions.

Music credit: 'Cellular Signals' by Laurent Levesque [SACEM] from Killer Tracks

Complete transcript available.

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

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Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Scientists
- Amber Emory (NASA/GSFC)
- Dalia B Kirschbaum (NASA/GSFC)
- Scott Braun (NASA/GSFC)
Producer
- Joy Ng (USRA)
Data visualizers
- Alex Kekesi (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
- Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC)
- Trent L. Schindler (USRA)
- Ernie Wright (USRA)
Technical support
- Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET Systems, Inc.)