Weather-Studying Warthog: A Fixed-Up A-10 Will Fly Into Thunderstorms

The National Science Foundation is refurbishing a retired A-10 warplane, equipping it with scientific instruments to study severe-weather systems. This Thunderbolt will soon be flying into thunderstorms.

By Mara Grunbaum
Popular Mechanics
November 18, 2011 2:30 PM

The U.S. military's veteran A-10 Thunderbolt II is built for battle: a titanium-armored cockpit protects its pilot from explosive projectile hits, and it can carry weapons like a 30-mm nose-mounted cannon to take out enemy tanks. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to arm a retired Thunderbolt not with bombs, but with scientific instruments, and use it to study the inside of violent thunderstorms—where winds, hail, and lightning would take down lesser planes.

The NSF recently awarded a $10.9 million grant to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., a to refurbish a retired Thunderbolt for use as a storm-penetrating research plane, the journal Science reported this week. Stripped of weapons and outfitted with instruments and sensors, the extra-tough A-10 will let researchers study massive, energetic storms from the inside, increasing their understanding of how these damaging storms form and evolve, and helping meteorologists predict when and where they will strike.

"Conventional research aircraft avoid these severe storms, so they're basically outside looking in," meteorologist and veteran storm-chaser Joshua Wurman of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colo, tells PM. "We want to study the worst weather, but we're trying to keep the [plane] outside the worst weather. With the A-10, we don't have that limitation."

A couple of the Thunderbolt's targets will be supercell thunderstorms, which birth tornadoes, and mesoscale convective systems, giant storm clusters that can produce thunder and lightning, pounding hail, and damaging winds. Ground-based radar systems can track wind and precipitation in these systems fairly well from a distance. But to understand how temperature and humidity contribute to tornado formation, for example, researchers need to get at the heart of the storm.

The A-10 replaces a T-28, a small, single-propeller armored plane that flew into storms for 35 years before it was grounded in 2005. The Thunderbolt (also nicknamed Warthog, after its toughness and looks) can carry more than five times as much weight as the T-28, meaning it could bring heavier instruments such as radar and other remote-sensing equipment into the air. The A-10 has a far greater range, too, which will let it venture out to study thunderstorms over the ocean and the mechanics of hurricane formation. And where the T-28 had a maximum altitude of 23,000 feet, the Thunderbolt can reach nearly 40,000 feet: high enough to get above some storms, or to study the upper reaches of severe storms that stretch as high as 50,000 feet above sea level. "A lot of the important physics is happening throughout the depth of these storms," Wurman says, "so the higher we can go, the more comprehensive the measurements we can take."

The A-10 is rugged, but not invincible. It couldn't fly directly into a tornado, for example, and very high g-forces or hailstones much bigger than golf balls would probably put the plane and its pilot at risk. Scientists on the ground plan to use satellite communications to monitor the plane and direct it toward the most interesting parts of the storm, but ultimately, it will be up to the pilot to decide whether it's safe to proceed. "Doing frontier science does involve risks, but there are limits," said Brad Smull, a program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences, in a live chat hosted by Science this week.

The ready-to-be-refurbished Thunderbolt recently arrived at the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies, which operates several other aircraft for scientific research. The mechanics there will modify it for NSF's purposes. But since the A-10 is already hardened for wartime use, Smull said, the mechanics won't have to do too many structural modifications to make the plane stand up to intense storms (though they will remove the cannon and tweak the hardpoints that used to hold bombs to make room for scientific instruments). And because the A-10 originally was built for ground attacks, the plane can fly at slower speeds, which means it can spend a longer time inside storms recording quality data.

The NSF plans to have the plane ready by 2013, at which point scientists will submit proposals for how to use it. According to Sonia Lasher-Trapp, a meteorologist at Purdue University, researchers are already talking about commissioning the Thunderbolt to study electrical activity and lightning production, hail formation, and how thunderstorms over the ocean differ from those over land. Data the plane collects will also help refine computer models and algorithms for predicting storms based on radar and satellite observations.

And, surely, scientists will dream up entirely new uses for the Thunderbolt once it's available, Wurman says. "Once somebody has an airplane, scientists come up with all sorts of things that they want to measure."

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NSF to Turn Tank Killer Into Storm Chaser

NSF to Turn Tank Killer Into Storm Chaser

Science 11 November 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6057 p. 747
DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6057.747
News & Analysis
Atmospheric Science

NSF to Turn Tank Killer Into Storm Chaser

David Malakoff

Summary:
On the battlefields of Iraq, the U.S. military's A-10 Thunderbolt jet was a fearsome tank killer able to survive punishing hits from antiaircraft fire. Now, one retired Thunderbolt is taking on a new scientific mission that fits its nickname. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given a $10.9 million grant to a U.S. Navy university to transform the warplane into an aircraft capable of withstanding stomach-churning winds, pounding hail, and lightning strikes as it probes the heart of heavy weather. The grant, made 23 September, caps a 6-year effort to replace a propeller-driven T-28 military trainer that was grounded in 2005 after 35 years of storm chasing.

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Live Chat: The Science of Storm Chasing

by David Malakoff on 16 November 2011, 12:13 PM

A flash of lightning, a clap of thunder. Big storms have long inspired awe, fear—and a lot of scientific interest. Now, researchers are getting an unusual new tool to probe severe weather: A retired warplane best known for destroying tanks on the battlefield. In September, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced that it will spend about $13 million to convert an A-10 Thunderbolt jet fighter into a next-generation storm penetrator. The heavily-armored aircraft will lug a suite of high-tech instruments into the hearts of storms to study everything from how hail and lightning form to mysterious bursts of high-energy gamma rays. What are some capabilities this new plane will have that its predecessor didn't? Will it help scientists learn to identify killer storms before they strike? And why, in the age of high-tech satellites and super-sharp radar, do we need to risk a pilot's life flying into a storm at all?

Join us for a live chat about the new storm penetrator and the science it will enable at 3 p.m. EST on Thursday, 17 November, on this page. You can leave your questions in the comment box below before the chat starts.

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Warplane Goes From Tank Killer to Storm Chaser

Nov 15, 2011 02:01 PM ET
OurAmazingPlanet Staff

One of the military's feared tank killers, the A-10 Thunderbolt, will soon start its new career as a storm chaser.

The retired plane is getting a $13 million scientific makeover so that it can fly though some of nature's biggest storms and withstand hail and lightning strikes, reported Science magazine (Subscription required). Also known as the Warthog, the Thunderbolt is not the prettiest plane, but it will gather data that will be beautiful in the eyes of storm-chasing scientists.

The Thunderbolt will replace a T-28 military trainer that retired in 2005 after 35 years chasing storms. That plane was limited by the number of instruments it could carry, and the retro-fitted Thunderbolt will carry more instruments. It will also fly higher and linger in storms longer. The plane's 30-millimeter cannon will be dismounted and replaced with scientific instruments. "Hard points" under the wings will carry sensors and instruments instead of bombs and missiles.

The U.S. Navy's Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., will acquire and operate the Thunderbolt. Former A-10 pilots will command the planes into the heart of the storms.

Severe weather scientists have other ways to see inside a storm from afar — weather balloons and storm skirting aircraft — but the best data is found in the heart of the bad weather.

"You really have to go right into the storm to get the most useful data," meteorologist Terry Schuur told Science. Schuur works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.

The National Science Foundation, which is funding the conversion, expects to have the planes back in the sky by 2013.

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Question: Has been this A-10 already selected or acquired? If yes, anybody who can tell me it's serial number? By the way: I remember an older proposal, made by the U.S. Forestry Servive, to purchase two A-10s and modifying them as water bombers to fight forest fires.