Robbie Hood Briefs Interagency Coordinating Committee for Airborne Geosciences Research and Applications (ICCAGRA) on Global Hawk UAS Hurricane Mission Successes.
The NOAA Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Program Director, Robbie Hood, briefed at the Spring 2017 ICCAGRA Meeting which was held June 13-14th at NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (brief below). The briefing highlighted the positive results from NOAA’s Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) Missions which included:
- During the 2016 hurricane season, 9 flights with 3 consecutive flights over Hurricane Matthew
- Flew 213 science flight hours and 239 total flight hours on NASA’s Global Hawk
- Deployed 647 dropsondes in and around four Hurricanes
- Deployed a record 90 dropsondes in a single Global Hawk flight (aviation record)
- SHOUT team on call for 10 consecutive weeks
- Results prove Global Hawk is VERY useful for improving hurricane track forecast
- Peak improvement about 15% at 72 h
- Statistically significant improvement at 72 and 96 h
The Interagency Coordinating Committee for Airborne Geosciences Research and Applications (ICCAGRA) was established to improve cooperation, foster awareness, facilitate communication among sponsoring agencies that have airborne assets and instruments for research and applications, and serve as a resource to senior level management on airborne geosciences issues. The Committee will address interagency cooperation issues as they pertain to the use of airborne platforms and payloads for individual investigators as well as national and international field campaigns.