Anticipating "The Big One"

UAV TRACKS HURRICANE
One of the newer tools for weather tracking and forecasting is unmanned aircraft. This became a reality last year when hurricane researchers at the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami kept an unmanned aircraft in the air for 10 hours during Tropical Storm Ophelia. Known as Aerosonde, the aircraft provided first-ever detailed observations of the near-surface, high-wind hurricane environment, an area often too dangerous for manned NOAA and U.S. Air Force Reserve aircraft to observe directly (Fig. 2). The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was designed and built by Australia-based Aerosonde Pty. Ltd., which was acquired by AAI Corp. in June.

The Aerosonde platform that flew into Ophelia was specially outfitted with instruments used in traditional hurricane observations, including GPS, dropwindsondes, and a satellite communications system that relayed information on temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind speed every half second in real-time.

The Aerosonde also carried a downward-positioned infrared sensor that was used to estimate the underlying sea surface temperature. All data was transmitted in near real time to the NOAA National Hurricane Center and AOML, where the NOAA Hurricane Research Division is located.

Another new joint NOAA/NASA project is to investigate why some thunderstorms developing off the coast of Africa that seem to work their way to the Americas cause damage and why others don't. Essentially, NOAA and NASA will attempt to predict the intensity of these storms, using specially equipped NASA aircraft and satellites, weather radar, and balloons.

So what's it going to take to improve the forecasting of natural disasters? More of the same, only better—that i s, more computing power to improve modeling techniques and data gathering and analysis, more sophisticated weather-specific satellites, and sensors.

See associated figure