Military surveillance drone switched from protecting our troops in mid east death trap to researching rarely occurring clouds under NASA/NOAA

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US Air Force transfers surveillance drone from protecting our military to studying US weather patterns that rarely occur.

• 8/13, "Drones to be used for hurricane study," AP, T. Winton, Miami
  

"The federal government is preparing to launch a study to solve one of the most vexing questions about hurricanes: Why do some storm systems rapidly intensify into destructive cyclones,

• while most remain weak?

Starting this week, a squadron of manned and unmanned aircraft is poised to investigate an

• intriguing theory

New to the data collection effort this year is the Global Hawk, a high-altitude, jet-powered unmanned surveillance drone about the size of a corporate jet.

• It's used by the military to do reconnaissance in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• The aircraft - given to NASA by the Air Force -

will launch missions from Dryden, Calif., fly over the U.S.-Mexico border, and then into the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike a piloted craft, which must return to land so the crew can rest, it can spend 24 hours on station, Marks said.

• While forecasters are hoping to catch a storm in formation, they know that most won't.

• "We're going to sample a lot of duds," he said. ...

The combined fleet of manned aircraft and unmanned high-altitude surveillance drones, able to drop probes deep into the clouds,

• will be able to send back a real-time, wide-ranging image of an entire storm system,
  
• not just observations from a single plane or distant satellite.

"The reason we're sampling the whole domain with this many aircraft is that we can get a better idea of what these embryonic systems look like, said Frank Marks, the director of

• NOAA's Hurricane Research Division." ...

AP story via 106.5FM radio website, Mobile Alabama. photo of Iraq soldier crying from ColorLine News