Could UAVs Replace Storm Chasers?

The deaths of three storm chasers in Oklahoma reminded everyone how dangerous their job can be. Should machines be doing it instead?

Tornado-forecasting equipment can pick out the conditions likely to birth tornadoes. To know that there truly is a twister, though, Jeff Masters says, you need eyes in the area.

"Storm chasers do a real service," says Masters, the cofounder and chief meteorologist of the Weather Underground and a former hurricane hunter with NOAA. "Three out of four tornado warnings are false alarms, but if you've got somebody on the ground and they've got that tornado in sight, you know it's not a false alarm, and that saves lives."

Even with rugged vehicles and years of experience, storm chasing is a perilous pursuit—a fact of which we were reminded again this week. Veteran researcher Tim Samaras, frequently featured on the Discovery Channel program Storm Chasers, was killed last Friday along with his son, Paul, his business partner, Carl Young, and 10 other people who were caught in a huge tornado camouflaged by rain and mist that tore through El Reno, Okla.

Storm chasing for research and for fun has exploded in popularity in recent years—to wit, scores of storm spotters used their beacons to form giant initials TS, PS, and CY across the entire states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska in memory of the chasers who were killed. Yet like other dangerous and deadly pursuits, Masters says, weather chasing might soon become the domain of machines rather than men.

"Drones are going to take over," Masters says. "Within five years I think we'll be at the point where we've got drones that can get close enough to the storm to collect data and withstand the dents that come with it."

The El Reno, Okla., tornado, with triangles representing storm chasers from the Spotter Network.

NASA is already flying unmanned Global Hawks—the same model the USAF uses for high-altitude reconnaissance—into hurricanes and tropical storms as part of a multiyear research project. Other researchers at Oklahoma State University are developing 50-pound Kevlar-wrapped aircraft that resemble model airplanes and that can be guided around tornadoes.

Now in their second year, the NASA Global Hawks are piloted from a base in Wallops Island, Va., can stay airborne for 28 hours, and fly at 60,000 feet. They will be flying during the peak of the 2013 hurricane season—August 20 to September 23—and recording a wide range of measurements to determine how, when, and why hurricanes form. An onboard Doppler radar will monitor wind and precipitation levels, while a microwave radiometer will be used to take surface-level wind measurements near the so-called inner regions of tropical storms. Another microwave tool will sample temperature and humidity levels in and around hurricanes, while an Airborne Detector for Energetic Lighting Emissions (ADELE) will examine lightning bolts for gamma ray emissions.

The tornado-hunting flying machines being developed at OSU are likely a few years off. Yet, like the larger hurricane versions, their mission will be to measure the exact conditions that cause tornadoes to form—specifically temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity. (One major impediment to the OSU aircraft, however, is the slate of current FAA rules that require civilian operators to be within visual site of their remote-controlled aircraft. That range isn't enough to keep the pilots out of harm's way.)

Until they're ready, humans will keep rushing toward the storm. "The reason we need storm chasers now is because there's still so much we don't know about when and why tornadoes form—and when and why they die," Masters says. "To figure that out you need good data on wind, temperature, pressure, and moisture, and the only way to get that is to get close to these tornadoes."

Samaras actually measured the largest drop in barometric pressure ever recorded inside a tornado—100 millibars—when he placed a weather probe 100 yards in front of an approaching twister. "That's the closest I've been to a violent tornado," he is reported to have said. "And I have no desire to ever be that close again."

While drones may soon take over the job of data collection, don't expect storm chasing to go out of style. "People do it because weather is an incredible force," says Masters, whose NOAA Hurricane Hunter plane almost crashed during a survey of Hurricane Hugo in 1989. "And because it's just spectacular to witness."

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