Instead of decommissioning military drones once they have become obsolete NASA scientists have found a way to give the drones new life; instead of spying on foreign countries the drones will be used to spy on tropical storms as they strengthen to become hurricanes, according to the Associated Press.
"The biggest scientific question we're trying to attack is why do some hurricanes intensify very rapidly and why do others not intensify at all?" Paul Newman, deputy project scientist for the mission, said. "In the last 20 years, we've made terrific progress in forecasting where hurricane tracks will go. But we've made almost no progress in the past 20 years in forecasting intensity."
Since the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly at a very high altitude for an extremely long time it is perfectly suited for the task of flying over a storm and studying what is happening far below it. Scientists planned on sending one of the drones out to study Tropical Storm Gabrielle, the Associated Press reports.
Scientists hope that the new vantage point provided by the high cruising altitude of the Global Hawk will allow them to further understand the storms. The P-3 Hurricane Hunter, a specially equipped plane that can fly directly into a storm, has already given scientists an idea of how storms behave at low altitude, according to the Associated Press.
"As a Hurricane Hunter goes through a storm, they get very detailed information," Newman said. "Imagine that this (Global Hawk) will do kind of a cat scan of a hurricane, but Hurricane Hunters go in and it's like you're using a fine scalpel to look at the details of the patient, if you will."
Predicting the path and intensity of a hurricane is very difficult and can cause many problems; often times the call to evacuate goes out too late because a storm will radically change directions or strengthen. An abundance of caution can also cause problems in the long run; if residents are evacuated for a hurricane that ends up being very weak they will be less likely to heed evacuation warnings in the future.
If scientists were able to more accurately predict the intensity of a hurricane they would be able to know just how dangerous a hurricane would be well before it reached landfall, thus allowing authorities to react in a reasonable manner.
