Look at the tropics this evening. Rarely do you see five storms and disturbances lined up across the Gulf, Caribbean and Atlantic as now. We're going to be busy with Gustav for the Labor Day weekend, and then we'll probably pick up with Hanna ext week. And then there are the systems in the eastern Atlantic, both poised to become a depression. I think our work will be cut out for us.
Well, we did fly one of the two scheduled missions today - the Ocean Heat Content flight where we launched over 50 probes into the ocean to collect vertical profiles of temperature across the Gulf Loop Current and warm pool. We'll see what happens when Gustav crosses this area of considerably warmer water.
The jet flight - the one I was scheduled to fly on - was canceled. At the moment the National Hurricane Center is content with the model outputs for Gustav as shown here. As you can see, most of them are in agreement. NHC has a request in for a flight tomorrow followed by round-the-clock missions beginning Saturday.
The P-3s start their exhausting every 12 hour set of eight missions tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 pm. The last flight is currently scheduled for 4:00 am on Tuesday morning. It probably will be very close to the coast, so we will do a land-fall mission - one of the many experiments in the Hurricane Research Division's stable of experiments.
Following that it will be on to Hanna. Look how crazy the models forecast the motion of this
storm. It could be out east of the Bahamas for quite some time. And then it will be on to Barbados for the Aerosonde project late next week. Never a dull moment.
More as this crazy season develops.
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