NOAA’s Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) Experiment Observations and Forecast Impacts

Abstract

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) project evaluated the ability of observations from high-altitude unmanned aircraft to improve forecasts of high-impact weather events like tropical cyclones or mitigate potential degradation of forecasts in the event of a future gap in satellite coverage. During three field campaigns conducted in 2015 and 2016, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Global Hawk, instrumented with GPS dropwindsondes and remote sensors, flew 15 missions sampling 6 tropical cyclones and 3 winter storms. Missions were designed using novel techniques to target sampling regions where high model forecast uncertainty and a high sensitivity to additional observations existed. Data from the flights were examined in real time by operational forecasters, assimilated in operational weather forecast models, and applied postmission to a broad suite of data impact studies. Results from the analyses spanning different models and assimilation schemes, though limited in number, consistently demonstrate the potential for a positive forecast impact from the observations, both with and without a gap in satellite coverage. The analyses with the then-operational modeling system demonstrated large forecast improvements near 15% for tropical cyclone track at a 72-h lead time when the observations were added to the otherwise complete observing system. While future decisions regarding use of the Global Hawk platform will include budgetary considerations, and more observations are required to enhance statistical significance, the scientific results support the potential merit of the observations. This article provides an overview of the missions flown, observational approach, and highlights from the completed and ongoing data impact studies.

Precipitation Processes and Vortex Alignment during the Intensification of a Weak Tropical Cyclone in Moderate Vertical Shear

“…Hermine was well sampled by a variety of aircraft during most of its life cycle, including NOAA WP-3D (hereafter P-3) and G-IV aircraft, as a part of the NOAA Intensity Forecasting Experiment (IFEX; Rogers et al 2006Rogers et al , 2013, and the NASA Global Hawk (hereafter GH) as a part of the NOAA Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT; Wick et al 2020) campaign. These aircraft provided flight-level, dropsonde, and airborne Doppler radar observations of Hermine's structure and evolution.…”

Addressing the sensitivity of forecast impact to flight path design for targeted observations of extratropical winter storms: A demonstration in an OSSE framework

“…In the study, regions of sensitivity for the simulated GH dropsonde observations are generated using the ensemble transform sensitivity (ETS) method (Zhang et al ., 2016; Wang et al ., 2018). This methodology has been tested in earlier OSSEs (English et al ., 2018; Peevey et al ., 2018) and implemented and applied in the real‐time SHOUT‐ENRR field campaign (Kren et al ., 2018; Wick et al ., 2020). Briefly, the ETS technique is performed using a set of 80 lagged global ensemble forecasts initiated from global ensemble Kalman filter analyses over a 24 hr period, with 20 ensemble members in each 6 hr cycle and centered around five days before a winter storm reaching the VR at the verification time (VT).…”

“…Recent observing system experiments (OSEs) have evaluated the effectiveness of NASA's unmanned aerial systems (UAS) Global Hawk (GH) during the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) (Black et al ., 2014; Dunion et al ., 2018; Wick et al ., 2018, 2020) campaign (Kren et al ., 2016, 2018; Christophersen et al ., 2017, 2018a, 2018b; Sippel et al ., 2018). These OSEs addressed both winter storms during the NOAA's El Niño rapid response (ENRR) (Dole et al ., 2018) mission and tropical cyclones during the hurricane rapid response (HRR) campaign.…”

Recent Advances in Our Understanding of Tropical Cyclone Intensity Change Processes from Airborne Observations

“…In the U.S., this began~15 years ago, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Intensity Forecasting Experiment (IFEX; [3,6]). There was additionally the NOAA Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) experiment in 2015-2016 [7]. Other U.S.-based field campaigns include the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) extension to the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (NAMMA; [8]), Genesis and Rapid Intensification Project (GRIP; [9]), and Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3; [10]); the National Science Foundation (NSF) Pre-depression Investigation of Cloud Systems in the Tropics (PREDICT; [11]); and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Tropical Cyclone Structure-08 Experiment (TCS-08), Tropical Cyclone Intensity Experiment (TCI; [12]), and Impact of Typhoons on the Ocean in the Pacific (ITOP; [13]).…”