UW researchers hope to see into eye of hurricane ? from afar

In a 15-story building, in the middle of land-locked Wisconsin, a team of scientists waits for hurricane season. That?s when a multi-million dollar, unmanned aircraft will start flying from Wallops Island, Va., loaded up with a UW-Madison-engineered instrument to gather data from tropical storms off the Atlantic coast. “It’s sort of a mystery right now in our science community as to why hurricanes intensify or de-intensify,” said Chris Velden, a UW-Madison scientist working on the project. “We hope to get some information from this aircraft to be able to answer those questions.”