The Global Hawk Airborne Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System: Status and Initial Applications

The Airborne Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System (AVAPS) for the NASA Global Hawk unmanned aircraft was developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) through a partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Commonly referred to as the Global Hawk (GH) dropsonde system, the system can carry up to 88 sondes and has 8 active sounding channels for deployment on flights in excess of 24 hours. The dropsondes provide very high vertical resolution atmospheric profiles of temperature, humidity, and winds, with measurements of temperature, pressure, and humidity at 2 Hz, and GPS-derived wind speed and direction at 4 Hz. While sharing common sensors with standard dropsondes for manned aircraft, the GH dropsondes (also common with a newly developed system for the NCAR G-V manned research aircraft) are smaller, weighing only ~167 g and having a form factor similar to an empty paper towel roll.

Since the initial scientific deployment of the GH dropsonde system in the NOAA-led Winter Storms and Pacific Atmospheric Rivers (WISPAR) experiment in 2011, over 1000 dropsondes have been successfully deployed from the GH aircraft in studies of hurricanes, winter storms, and arctic weather. Data from the GH dropsondes are now playing a fundamental role in research in the NASA Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission and are beginning to be assimilated operationally at major numerical weather prediction centers. In light of the growing maturity of the system, this presentation reviews the status and operation of the system, comparisons of the data with standard dropsondes and remote sensors, scientific applications during HS3, and plans for future enhanced operational use of the data.