I have read many interesting books and seen some documentaries over the years about the hurricane hunters: flying aircraft near and into hurricanes for scientific research and storm tracking. Now NASA is testing a Global Hawk to do the same thing. With a 60,000 foot operating altitude and long-duration flight times, it seems to offer some advantages to the manned missions. I wonder how long it will be before they start flying the fallout recon missions like G98 did.
The 53rd WRS (Typhoon Chasers), 54th WRS (Hurricane Hunters) and 55th WRS (Pole Vaulters) all flew the air sampling missions in support of nuclear reconnaissance. In fact, the external sampling foils and internal P-system as seen on the WC-130Es of the former were the same ones found installed on the WC-135s of the 55th WRS (The two remaining WC-135s now belong to the 55th Wing/45th RS at Offutt AFB). The U-2 and B-52H sampling and directional radiation finding systems were unique to those two airframes, but you'll know just by looking when they were configured for that mission, no problem.
Regarding the use of a drone to fly nuclear reconnaissance? It was being researched heavily by my unit when I retired from the mission in 2006. I have no doubts they're already flying and sampling, but in a restricted envelope - Global Hawks don't like low-altitude stuff, and a good portion of the stuff we hoovered was at transport layer wind altitude. That's the predominant outflow mechanism...
