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>> You got the other one?
>> Yeah, you want to torque it though?
>> No, if you've got it tight.
>> The goal of the El Nino rapid response experiment is to look
at how changes in the weather patterns, the evaporation
of moisture in the tropics,
how that is changed during a major El Nino event
like the current one out there.
And then to look at how those changes further impact the
weather on the west coast of the United States.
My name is Gary Wick.
I'm a physicist with NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory,
physical sciences division in Boulder.
And I'm on assignment
to the unmanned aircraft systems program within NOAA.
>> Boy that was the easiest we ever did it.
>> During this campaign we have four instruments onboard the
Global Hawk Aircraft.
The first is a dropsonde system,
which it deploys the very small sensors,
much like weather balloons that go up.
But these go down.
So these small sensors, they're about the size
of a paper towel roll,
and as they fall they collect very high resolution,
vertical resolution measurements of temperature,
humidity and wind speed.
So they give us a very detailed picture of the atmosphere.
>> Ready Mike?
>> Yeah.
>> In addition to that, we have the HAMSR,
which is a microwave sounding instrument.
And that provides sampling much like one
of the weather satellites that is used extensively
in our weather models.
The third instrument is HIWRAP.
It's a Doppler precipitation radar.
So just like the weather radars on the ground,
we're flying a radar on the aircraft
which gives three dimensional coverage
of precipitation of rain droplets.
And with information from those rain droplets,
we can drive continuous measurements
of the wind speed in the atmosphere.
The final instrument is the NOAA ozone sensor,
which provides measurements of ozone concentration
at the flight level of the Global Hawk.
The Global Hawk provides amazing capability for this experiment,
just in its ability to be airborne
for up to 24 hours or more.
But by being aloft for that long,
we can sample a large range of the ocean.
You know, almost like a satellite does.
With the Global Hawk we get very detailed sampling
like an aircraft but with the endurance
that a satellite would give us.
So we're able to sample this large area and look at changes
in the atmosphere that wouldn't be possible
with other traditional manned aircraft.
>> My name is John Neuhaus.
I'm Deputy Project Manager for the NASA Global Hawk program.
I'm actually a commissioned officer
with the NOAA Commission Corps.
I've been flying the Global Hawk here at NASA for four years,
as an aircraft commander and instructor pilot.
So as you can see here,
the Global Hawk has no yoke or stick to fly with.
We use a mouse from takeoff to landing,
climb and descents when we're underway.
Everything is automated in the Global Hawk.
So all I need to do is do a mouse click here on the screen
to say take off or to land, climb,
descent, maintain an altitude.
Everything is done by this mouse click.
And it's very much like flying
in autopilot in a manned aircraft.
And what NOAA is using this is as a study
to use unmanned aerial vehicles over high impact weather events
such as hurricanes, and in this campaign we're actually using it
over El Nino events in the Pacific.
We're going to be working with Air Force C-130s.
We're going to be working with NOAA gulf streams.
And also a NOAA ship, the Ronald H. Brown.
So we've got C-130s covering one part, G-4 covering another part,
and the ship covering other stuff.
And we're going to be in the parts that are harder to reach.
We typically take off at first light so we can get to the area
of interest to study El Nino weather per the science request.
This usually takes about eight hours to transit
to the area that we're studying.
And once we're there we spend several hours analyzing all kind
of weather phenomena that has piqued the interest
of the scientist.
It usually takes about eight hours
to bring the plane back home, so that gives us
about a total flight time of 24 hours per each sorte.
>> I'm Herman Posada, and I'm a UAS Research Pilot here
at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center.
And I fly the Global Hawk for airborne science.
While we're flying the aircraft from launching many screens,
mostly we're looking at we're on the right track
that science has requested us to fly on.
We are also obviously looking at various parameters
of the aircraft, make sure we don't get into any trouble
with the airspeed, altitude, or the heading.
The flight plans continuously gets updated
as science changes the area of interest.
Obviously these storms are moving,
and we are trying to keep up with them.
>> So in the Global Hawk Operations Center during a
flight, we're going to be monitoring the flight
with this wonderful mission tool suite capability
that NASA has developed.
And with that, it allows us to see the data coming
in from the aircraft in real time, satellite data
and multiple things for us
to really see what's happening as we go along.
And so we'll be watching for is can we see the weather patterns?
Can we see patterns in the humidity that let us know
that we're sampling the areas that are eventually going
to move downstream and impact the US?
The Global Hawk's a one-of-a-kind capability
that in NOAA we have a great observing system
from satellites to aircraft to ships.
But there's nothing
that provides the capability of the Global Hawk.
So within NOAA we really want to see
if that is a really good addition
to our current observing system.
And so by collaborating
with NASA we get this wonderful opportunity
to test its capabilities, see its impact on the forecast,
and then hopefully that opens the door
for a broader collaboration down the line
to do this on a regular basis.
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