17 minute read
Floating and Flying Laboratories
NOAA ships and aircraft
By Jan Tegler
NOAA’s ships and aircraft are among the most striking representatives of the organization’s many missions, serving as floating and flying laboratories for scientific research on a multitude of earth systems, as real-time sensors for short and long term weather forecasting, and as emergency response platforms.
NOAA Ship Bell Shimada during the 2010 Pacific Hake Inter-Vessel Calibration.
Fifteen active crewed research and service ships and nine crewed aircraft sail and fly around the continental U.S., U.S. territories, and across the globe to carry out an impressive array of studies, experiments, conservation efforts and data gathering. These are augmented by more than 400 small boats that carry out a range of complimentary data collection missions, primarily in nearshore environments. A growing cadre of uncrewed aircraft systems also fly globally to collect data in new ways. and go from their homeports, from the East Coast to Hawaii.
But it’s the people who sail, fly, operate sensors, and maintain the organization’s ships and aircraft who are the enablers of NOAA’s missions above the earth, on the seas and below them. A highly skilled combination of NOAA Corps aircraft pilots and ships’ bridge officers as well as civilian professional mariners and aviation technicians staff the vehicles that scientists and researchers from academia, research institutions around the world, and NOAA line offices embark on.
Their work provides the foundation for NOAA’s floating and flying laboratories.
NOAA Research Vessel Fleet
Bell M. Shimada
Fairweather
Ferdinand R. Hassler
Gordon Gunter
Henry B. Bigelow
Nancy Foster
Okeanos Explorer
Oregon II
Oscar Dyson
Oscar Elton Sette
Pisces
Rainier
Reuben Lasker
Ronald H. Brown
Thomas Jefferson
Multipurpose Mariners
Capt. Daniel Simon, director of marine operations for NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, is one of NOAA’s most experienced mariners, having plied the world’s oceans on the organization’s vessels since his first posting 19 years ago aboard the now-retired fisheries survey ship Miller Freeman.
NOAA Ship Ferdinand Hassler.
These days he’s in charge of making sure NOAA’s fleet of large vessels is prepared to sail to execute NOAA’s missions, a steep challenge due to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
But before rising to his current position in NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO), Simon commanded two of its largest vessels, the 224-foot the Hi’ialakai based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the 274-foot, Charleston, South Carolina-based Ronald H. Brown, NOAA’s biggest ship.
NOAA’s 15 active ships undertake a range of tasks that fall under five main mission categories, Simon explained.
“We work in all of the world’s oceans, doing fisheries work, hydrographic surveys [measuring the physical features of water bodies, including the shape and features of shorelines, tide, current, and wave characteristics, and the physical and chemical properties of water], bathymetry work [studying the beds or floors of water bodies, bathymetric maps illustrate the land that lies underwater], basic oceanography and basic ocean research.”
The now-retired Hi’ialakai specialized in coral reef ecosystem mapping, coral reef health and fish stock studies, and maritime heritage surveys. Ronald H. Brown supports a variety of scientific studies to increase understanding of the relationship between the world’s oceans and its climate. But both “have the ability to cross over into other realms and do other projects as needed,” Simon noted.
He took command of Brown in the summer of 2018 as it was in the latter stages of a 243-day aroundthe-world expedition conducting scientific research and servicing buoys that inform global weather, climate and ocean forecasting.
“I actually picked the ship up in the Seychelles and took command in Goa, India,” he said, recalling that the ship was “servicing buoys and putting the finishing touches” on the Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction – or Rama Array.
The array is “a tropical, equatorial array of buoys tasked with measuring subsurface temperature and other information we can’t get any other way,” Simon said. “It goes into the forecast for monsoons for the entire Asian continent and has ramifications worldwide.”
Initiated in 2004, part of the array is in a comparatively low-trafficked area of the world’s oceans. “There were buoys in the northwest quadrant of the array in the Arabian Ocean that, due to piracy issues, hadn’t been finalized over the years,” Simon said. “We put in the final three moorings on that array, and the Indian government promised that if we put the initial buoys in they would service them yearly.”
Simon and the crew of the Brown exercised caution on another mission the voyage undertook: measuring ocean chemistry. “The line that we were doing, from Mauritius to the Arabian Sea, hadn’t been done since 1994 due to piracy concerns,” Simon explained. “When water samples come onboard a group of scientists rapidly analyzes the water, as quickly as possible before it changes from interacting with the surface atmosphere. They measure the dissolved oxygen content and the physical, biological and chemical constituents of the water.”
NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown.
Commissioned in 1997, Ronald H. Brown typically deploys for just over a month, exercising its impressive capabilities as NOAA’s largest floating laboratory. Operated by a crew of 29, including six NOAA Corps officers who primarily serve as the ship’s bridge team, the vessel also carries engineering and operations personnel and technicians who look after its electronics and liaise with the scientists who embark on Brown for a variety of research.
“It’s a fantastic vessel and I felt honored to be the commanding officer,” Simon said. “Brown has about 4,000 square feet of laboratory space, significantly more than our typical NOAA research vessels. It holds up to 60 people, 30 of them scientists, and can easily go worldwide with incredible capability. When it came out in 1997 it must have been absolutely state of the art. I still felt like it was state of the art when I took command in 2018.”
Simon’s tenure as Brown’s commander fell slightly short of the two-year tour that’s typical for large NOAA ships when he was assigned to his present position. But when his successor fell ill on a subsequent mission that took the ship to South Africa, Simon was sent to take command and bring Brown home. “I was taken a little early from command of the ship,” he said. “So for me it was nice to go back and finish on a good note.”
Like NOAA’s other ships, Brown is tasked through NOAA’s Fleet Council, Simon explained, noting that each of line offices in NOAA have priorities. “Some of those priorities are made with a definite vessel in mind, but all are made with NOAA’s requirements in mind to complete its mission, its responsibilities to Congress and the public.”
But in early spring 2020, NOAA’s fleet was called home, curtailing the missions they were in the midst of due to COVID-19. Simon has been among those instrumental in trying to keep ship crews safe while balancing NOAA’s operational posture.
“Our priority is keeping our mariners safe and the virus as far away from them as we possibly can,” he said. “We’ve had one ship sail in this period and that ship left again in mid-July. Our other ships are preparing to sail as well, but it’s a new paradigm to work in.”
Low, Slow, and Good to Go – The Twin Otters
Lt. Conor Maginn was “on the road” flying one of NOAA’s four de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters for 210 days – or approximately seven months – in 2019. Known as the workhorse of the NOAA aircraft fleet, the Twin Otter is the most versatile airplane in the agency’s nine-aircraft fleet, operated from Lakeland, Florida by the Aircraft Operations Center.
A patch worn by Twin Otter pilots and copilots on their flight suits features a motto that said a lot about the missions they perform. “We need to fly the airplane slow and low to the ground to tackle the missions we do,” Maginn said. “Our motto is ‘Low, Slow and Good to Go – The Twin Otters’.”
NOAA pilots Lt. Conor Maginn and Lt. j.g. Mason Carroll with Twin Otter NOAA46 after a Snow Survey Mission in Minneapolis, Minnesota, February 2020.
The twin-engine Otters are crewed by two pilots, acting as aircraft commander and copilot, and carry two to six researchers depending on the mission. Maginn said the pilots “switch seats” every day so that copilots can gain enough experience to become aircraft commanders, usually over a two-year period.
Maginn and his fellow Twin Otter pilots take pride in their skills, often flying missions at 500 feet or below at 100 to 120 knots (115-138 mph) for long periods of time. “Our Twin Otter crews are really good pilots across the board,” Maginn said. “We fly close to the ground with few options for getting out of bad situations. “Generally our pilots don’t specialize in just one mission. That means being able to fly missions low and slow from the Atlantic to Alaska to down in the mountains.”
Most people visualize NOAA aircraft flying over bodies of water, but some unique missions take Twin Otter crews to parts of the United States where you wouldn’t expect to find them. The snow survey mission is a good example. In autumn and again mid-to-late winter, NOAA dispatches Twin Otters to the upper Midwest, New England, Alaska and Canada to gather information about the water content found in the snowpack that accumulates in these areas. The data collected helps the National Weather Service determine the extent of the flooding that might result when snow melts in the spring.
“We fly over a series of survey lines in the fall and gather the background amount of gamma radiation that’s emitted from the soil,” Maginn explained. “Then we fly over the same lines in the winter, and what happens is that the snowpack blocks or attenuates that gamma radiation signal. We can compare numbers from the fall and winter and figure out effectively the amount of water content in the snow.”
In 2019, Twin Otter crews were also deployed for a project called Firex-AQ – Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality. Maginn said two of NOAA’s turbine-powered Otters were fitted with instruments to measure the chemical composition of smoke emitted from wildfires. Over the course of two months, working jointly with NASA, Maginn and other pilots flew through wildfire smoke in Idaho, Oregon, Arizona and Utah.
“We actually had two Otters flying on that,” Maginn recalled. “One flew over the top of the smoke trying to identify where the best, safest area to sample the smoke was and the other Otter was down in the smoke itself. I flew the low altitude one and it was quite challenging. We had masks on in the plane and we rinsed the aircraft’s compressors after almost every flight.”
More customary missions, including marine mammal research such as surveys of North Atlantic right whales (one of the world’s most endangered large whale species, with only about 400 whales remaining) call on Twin Otter pilots to fly in circles – all hand flying – as low as 600 feet above the Atlantic to allow scientists aboard the aircraft to photograph the whales they find for identification and to track migration patterns. Twin Otter crews are also dispatched to the Arctic Circle and Alaska to survey marine mammal populations and gather data on sea ice for climate research.
“I don’t know of any other job that is as rewarding as the job I have right now,” Maginn said. “But in a few years I think I’d like to fly the P-3.”
Orions – Hunters and Gatherers
NOAA’s two Lockheed WP-3D Orion long-range hurricane hunter aircraft, known affectionately as “Miss Piggy” and “Kermit,” are among the most visible equipment NOAA operates. They’re often featured in news coverage of hurricanes, flying into and around the storms to gather a wide range of data for the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service, and others.
Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Doremus has been flying NOAA’s Lockheed WP-3Ds for three years. A “homegrown” NOAA aviator, Doremus progressed through the ranks, flying other planes from the Aircraft Operations Center fleet before earning a coveted spot as an Orion pilot. Many of NOAA’s WP-3D pilots are “inter-service transfers,” having made the switch from flying the U.S. Navy’s now-retired P-3C Orions to NOAA’s Orions. Doremus went through the Navy’s challenging P-3 syllabus without having prior Navy experience, and loves his job.
Head-on view of a NOAA Lockheed WP-3D Orion “hurricane hunter” aircraft in flight.
“We do some really dynamic flying,” he said. “It’s challenging, but we have crews with a ton of experience and we learn from each other every day.”
During hurricane season the two WP-3Ds are almost always in motion
when storms are present, with one aircraft taking off when another lands so “that we have a continuous presence around the storm to deliver the most up-to-date information possible,” Doremus explained.
Up to 22 people can be aboard a WP-3D during a hurricane mission, Doremus said. They include three pilots who rotate through the cockpit to allow one to be on break, two flight engineers, one or two flight directors/meteorologists, a navigator, aircraft technicians, including airframe and data specialists, a dropsonde (a tubeshaped instrument with a variety of weather sensors inside) operator, visiting scientists from universities and institutions as well as NOAA personnel from the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory’s Hurricane Research Division, and even media.
“We do hurricane reconnaissance, where we identify the center of a storm, determine where it is and what it’s doing, and relay that information to the Hurricane Center,” Doremus explained. “The other missions are for hurricane research, and we can do both missions simultaneously.”
WP-3D crews use a variety of sensors to characterize a hurricane, including the aircraft’s tail-mounted Dual Doppler radar. This very high resolution radar captures a three-dimensional picture of hurricanes, revealing a vertical picture of their structure that is a gold mine of information for researchers to improve forecasts of hurricane intensity – a vital measure of a hurricane’s potential for destruction and information critical for public safety.
But as “sporty” as flying through the eye-wall of hurricanes is, Doremus said it’s not the most demanding flying WP-3D crews do. “Our tornado research mission – from a pilot’s perspective, that’s the most challenging, high risk flying we do because the environment we fly in is dynamic.”
Prior to hurricane season NOAA Orion crews can be found flying from Kansas and Alabama along the precarious front edge of the super cell storms that spawn tornadoes. Climbing to 7,000 feet, the WP-3D crews fly directly toward weather all other pilots avoid like the plague.
“Flying though these storms could rip the airplane to pieces,” Doremus said. But careful flight planning and pre-flight briefs with scientists who are aboard for the tornado research flights allow the researchers to get as close as safely possible to the deadly supercells,” he said.
“Every storm is a little different, and you never know exactly what you’ll get, but we’re very risk cautious on these missions,” Doremus explained. “We fly with our Aircraft Operations Center meteorologists aboard. They sit right behind us in the flight station with computers that display all of our radars – our nose radar, lower fuselage radar which scans 360 degrees around the aircraft, and our tail Doppler radar. They’re looking at the big picture in real time, and help us steer the safest path.”
All WP-3D pilots fly other NOAA aircraft. Doremus also flies the Aircraft Operations Center’s Gulfstream Turbo Commander on snow survey and soil moisture missions as well as gravity measuring surveys, known as “GRAV-D” on behalf of NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey. GRAV-D missions are underway nationwide and across U.S. territories to measure the earth’s gravity field to model and monitor Earth’s geoid (a surface of the gravity field, very closely related to global mean sea level). Measurements serve as a zero reference surface for all heights in the nation. Accurate heights are critical to many scientific endeavors, but particularly to understanding and protecting lowlying coastal ecosystems.
Discovering the Big Picture
“I joined the NOAA Corps to be a ship driver, a mariner,” said Cmdr. Rebecca Waddington. A meteorologist with a degree from San Jose State University, Waddington had a father with an aerospace engineering background, but never had an ambition to become a pilot – that is, until the NOAA Corps notified personnel throughout the agency that it was in need of pilots.
“I had interned at the National Weather Forecast Office in Monterey, California, and then went and did oceanography on several NOAA ships and had a ball,” Waddington said.
Thereafter, she joined the NOAA Corps, earned a commission, and was assigned to one of the agency’s oceanographic vessels. It was while she was serving as a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center that an internal NOAA email alerted her to the possibility of flying.
“I went for an interview and told them I had no experience in aviation,” Waddington remembered. “I told them I did have a different kind of experience, running scientific missions. They must have liked what I said, because they sent me to flight school, and before I knew it I was flying the King Air.”
Waddington continues to fly NOAA’s Beechcraft King Air 350CER and will likely fly the new King Air the Aircraft Operations Center has acquired as a replacement for the Turbo Commander. But these days her primary duty is as aircraft commander of the agency’s high altitude, long range, high-speed research platform – a modified Gulfstream IV-SP (G-IV).
Capt. Kristie Twining (right) and Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Waddington in the cockpit of NOAA’s Gulfstream IV hurricane hunter jet “Gonzo.”
Waddington also flies the G-IV, nicknamed “Gonzo,” as part of a crew that typically includes three pilots (one for relief), two meteorologists, and one technician. While the WP- 3D crews are flying at lower altitude through hurricanes, Waddington and the G-IV crews fly around and above the storms, monitoring them with a Doppler radar but also deploying dropsondes from high altitude.
“The purpose of the dropsondes is to fill the numerical forecast models with actual data,” said the meteorologist-turned pilot. “They send information back to the plane via a VHF radio frequency. In the ocean we don’t have the weather stations we have on land. There are a lot of assumptions for weather data from the oceans, and over time errors with the assumptions propagate. We gather actual data to replace those assumptions to improve forecasts. It’s also getting data at the surface, where it’s unsafe to fly in a hurricane.”
The G-IV is looking at “the bigger picture of hurricanes,” Waddington explained, flying patterns hundreds of miles away from a storm as well as over the top of it. “We’re figuring out how the environment outside of the storm is going to affect the storm’s development and motion,” she said.
Waddington said the G-IV also flies the GRAV-D mission and NOAA’s atmospheric rivers mission. Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics. These columns of vapor move with the weather, carrying an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River. When the atmospheric rivers make landfall, they often release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow. The most extreme examples can cause flooding and induce mudslides.
“We can climb to 45,000 in the G-IV,” Waddington explained. “And we look at storm systems coming across the Pacific Ocean in the winter impacting the west coast. The higher we go, the more data we can sample. We can get into the stratosphere much earlier during these winter missions, at higher latitudes than we do during hurricane missions.”
Coastal mapping is the mission Waddington flies most often in NOAA’s King Air. She describes it as “almost like mowing a lawn, taking photos of the shoreline and updating nautical charts for shipping.”
Sometimes the King Air’s sensors come into play with emergency response missions in unexpected ways. After Hurricane Michael devastated Panama City, Florida, in 2018, Waddington and a crew were flying emergency response, photographing the damage to the area. The King Air’s high-resolution cameras picked up something unexpected, she said.
“Someone had many trees fall around their house and couldn’t get out,” she remembers. “They actually arranged some of the logs to spell out the word “help”. We didn’t see that with our naked eye flying over but one of our analysts who happened to be scanning through the geo-referenced imagery saw that, and were able to get the people the help they needed.”
As Waddington notes, NOAA’s ships and aircraft are first and foremost floating and flying laboratories “but they also do more.”
