NASA is set to launch a fleet of small satellites to improve hurricane intensity, track and storm-surge forecasts.

"This is a first-of-its-kind mission," says Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "As a constellation of eight spacecraft, the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (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."

Artist's concept of one of the eight CYGNSS satellites deployed in space above a hurricane. Image credit: NASA.Using the same GPS technology that allows drivers to navigate streets, CYGNSS' constellation of microsatellite observatories will 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—the thick ring of thunderstorm clouds and rain that surrounds the calm eye of a hurricane—to gather data about a storm's intense inner core. The inner core region acts like the engine of the storm by extracting energy from the warm surface water via evaporation into the atmosphere.

"Today, we can't see what's happening under the rain," says 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."

The CYGNSS small satellite observatories will continuously monitor surface winds over the oceans across the Earth's tropical hurricane-belt latitudes. Each satellite is capable of capturing four wind measurements per second, amounting to 32 wind measurements per second for the entire constellation.