The primary science goal of Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) is to better understand how and why winds in hurricanes intensify. CYGNSS is a unique satellite mission that consists of a constellation of eight small satellites.
Credits: NASA
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NASA is set to
launch its first Earth science small satellite constellation, which will
help improve hurricane intensity, track, and storm surge forecasts, on
Dec. 12 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) hurricane
mission will measure previously unknown details crucial to accurately
understanding the formation and intensity of tropical cyclones and
hurricanes.
“This is a first-of-its-kind mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen,
associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the
agency’s headquarters in Washington. “As a constellation of eight
spacecraft, CYGNSS will do what a single craft can’t in terms of
measuring surface wind speeds inside hurricanes and tropical cyclones at
high time-resolution, to improve our ability to understand and predict
how these deadly storms develop.”
The CYGNSS mission is expected to lead to more accurate weather
forecasts of wind speeds and storm surges -- the walls of water that do
the most damage when hurricanes make landfall.
Utilizing the same GPS technology that allows drivers to navigate
streets, CYGNSS will use a constellation of eight microsatellite
observatories to measure the surface roughness of the world’s oceans.
Mission scientists will use the data collected to calculate surface wind
speeds, providing a better picture of a storm’s strength and intensity.
Unlike existing operational weather satellites, CYGNSS can penetrate
the heavy rain of a hurricane’s eyewall to gather data about a storm’s
intense inner core. The eyewall is the thick ring of thunderstorm clouds
and rain that surrounds the calm eye of a hurricane. The inner core
region acts like the engine of the storm by extracting energy from the
warm surface water via evaporation into the atmosphere. The latent heat
contained in the water vapor is then released into the atmosphere by
condensation and precipitation. The intense rain in eyewalls blocks the
view of the inner core by conventional satellites, however, preventing
scientists from gathering much information about this key region of a
developing hurricane.
“Today, we can’t see what’s happening under the rain,” said Chris
Ruf, professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Climate and
Space Sciences and Engineering and principal investigator for the
CYGNSS mission. “We can measure the wind outside of the storm cell with
present systems. But there’s a gap in our knowledge of cyclone processes
in the critical eyewall region of the storm – a gap that will be filled
by the CYGNSS data. The models try to predict what is happening under
the rain, but they are much less accurate without continuous
experimental validation.”
The CYGNSS small satellite observatories will continuously monitor
surface winds over the oceans across Earth’s tropical hurricane-belt
latitudes. Each satellite is capable of capturing four wind measurements
per second, adding as much as 32 wind measurements per second for the
entire constellation.
CYGNSS is the first complete orbital mission competitively selected
by NASA’s Earth Venture program. Earth Venture focuses on low-cost,
rapidly developed, science-driven missions to enhance our understanding
of the current state of Earth and its complex, dynamic system and enable
continual improvement in the prediction of future changes.
The Space Physics Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan
College of Engineering in Ann Arbor leads overall mission execution in
partnership with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas,
and its Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering department leads the
science investigation. The Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science
Mission Directorate oversees the mission.
For more information about NASA’s CYGNSS mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/cygnss