With the August 22 arrival of the NASA Global Hawk unmanned aircraft on Virginia’s eastern shore, scientists and pilots are now ready to start the NOAA-led mission to improve hurricane forecasts of track and intensity using data collected by the Global Hawk during the season’s hurricanes.
This hurricane season, NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research will work with NOAA’s National Weather Service to upgrade weather forecast models and conduct research with unmanned air and water craft to improve forecasts of hurricane track and intensity.
This summer, more than 20 NOAA scientists will stay up late to learn why some thunderstorms form and grow at night, without the energy from the sun's heat. They will be participating in the Plains Elevated Convection At Night (PECAN), a large, intensive field campaign to collect data before and during nighttime thunderstorms in the western Great Plains from June 1 to July 15.
It is too soon to know if recent extreme cold weather such as the last two East Coast winters are linked to Arctic climate warming, according to new research published in the Journal of Climate by James Overland of NOAA, and other authors from North America, Asia and Europe.
Weather forecasters rely on an incredibly large amount of information when they make forecasts and issue warnings. A new system, activated by NOAA’s National Weather Service last week, quickly harnesses the tremendous amount of weather data from multiple sources, intelligently integrates the information, and provides a detailed picture of the current weather.
Last September’s widespread flooding in northeast Colorado, which saw just over 17 inches of rain in one week in the city of Boulder, was not made more likely or more intense by the effects of human-induced climate change, according to a new NOAA-led study published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
For the last five years, NOAA has teamed up with NASA to fly NASA’s Global Hawk unmanned aircraft to get an inside look at how hurricanes form and intensify over the Atlantic. The NASA-led project called the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel mission is demonstrating the ability of the Global Hawk to fly over hurricanes to gather continuous weather data on flights that are longer in duration than possible with manned aircraft. In the next three years, NOAA will take the next step with the Global Hawk, leading a new experiment and continuing its important collaboration with NASA. Drawing on technology and expertise honed in the current mission, NOAA will assess the feasibility of regular operations of Global Hawk to improve day-to-day forecasts of severe storms forming over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans.