(CNN) — NASA is using a modified version of the U-2 spy plane, created during the Cold War, to study one of Earth’s least understood weather phenomena: wildfire generated storms.
The jet, which NASA calls the ER-2, contains a flying laboratory of scientific instruments rather than military defenses and has different wiring.
The aircraft’s newest mission is to study weather generated storms.
Fire clouds, scientifically known as pyrocumulonimbus storms, are gigantic thunderstorms produced by wildfire heat. These storms can include lightning, strong winds, and in some cases, fire tornadoes.
“It’s kind of like a chimney where the smoke from the fire is being pushed upward into the thunderstorm, accelerated through that vertical column, and then released,” said David A. Peterson, a meteorologist at the Naval Research Laboratory.
He is the principal investigator for NASA’s INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment, or INSPYRE, a mission that will study these storms’ erratic behavior.
“The generated smoke column is basically a warm bubble that triggers the thunderstorm, so it’s like any other really tall, severe thunderstorm cloud, but now you’ve filled it with smoke. The fire at that point is essentially feeding itself,” Peterson said.
Meteorologists have not been able to properly forecast pyrocumulonimbus storms because they form during unpredictable conditions. Only recently, scientists discovered that these fire generated weather systems can surpass a natural atmospheric barrier, reaching the stratosphere.
“There’s a volcano-like effect, with smoke being pushed really high into the atmosphere, and we’ve learned in recent years that once smoke reaches these high altitudes, it can obviously be transported by jet stream winds really fast,” Peterson said.
The mission took flight in July and has already flown over burning wildfires in northern Oregon and western Canada.
“We’re looking with (NASA’s) INSPYRE mission to understand first and foremost what conditions produce these storms,” Peterson said.
NASA, which is tasked with aeronautics research, as well as space exploration, is using their ER-2 jets because of their high-altitude flying capabilities.
“Think of it as a steerable satellite. It’s flying above the weather at maybe 65,000 feet, and we can basically have it orbit back and forth over a wildfire,” Peterson said. “All of the instruments on the plane are tied to measuring the fire energetics of the plume. So, there’s radars that can tell you how big the plume is, the altitude it’s at, and then also the air motion within it. It’s also tracking lightning, so electric field within these clouds.”
And while the ER-2 plane is flying over the storm, NASA is simultaneously flying a Gulfstream 5 jet inside of the clouds.
“The idea is that the data they collect (can) inform each other,” Paterson said. The G-5 is directly in the clouds, and so it can inform the radars that are seeing the cloud and then relate that to what the airborne satellite, is telling you.”
The goal of this mission is mainly to one day being able to predict these storms.
“We’re both using tools that are just being developed now by some of our science team members to help guide the mission, but we’re also using the mission to help feed back to improve those prediction tools,” Peterson said. “There will inevitably be a component of the mission where we produce better tools to predict this type of fire behavior.”
Origins of the aircraft and its role in the Cold War
The ER-2’s lineage dates back to the mid-1950s, before spy satellites, when the US needed a plane to see what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.
“In the early 1950s, Soviet military and economic developments were a mystery to the United States because the USSR was a secretive, closed society,” according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
The U-2 spy plane, nicknamed “Dragon Lady,” was specifically designed to fly at extremely high altitudes over the Soviet Union.
At the time, the US believed that no Soviet missiles could reach the plane’s cruising altitude, giving it free range over the country.
But on May 1, 1960, just four years after the U-2’s debut, the Soviet miliary shot down one of the planes, flown by Francis Gary Powers, proving that the US underestimated Soviet capabilities.
Yet the U-2 continued to provide critical intelligence during the rest of the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War as well as modern conflicts, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, more than 70 years after the first flight, the U-2 “Dragon Lady” is still flying and NASA’s ER-2 is in the air working to defeat what it calls the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”
The-CNN-Wire
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