NOAA Adventures in the Sky - 2008 Hurricane Season

End of a Long Season

2009-01-20T22:02:00.007-05:00

Hi Folks -

With temperatures here in Tampa plunging to near or below freezing tonight, I guess it's safe to call an end to the 2008 hurricane season. It was a busy year for us and didn't end with

Hurricane Ike. We flew another storm, Hurricane Kyle, shortly thereafter and ended the season with Hurricane Paloma in November. Yes, I said November - the 7th and 8th to be exact - in a storm south of Cuba that rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 in two days. The Google Earth track as developed by a colleague is shown here. (Please click on the images to enlarge them - hit the back button to return to the blog.)

Paloma was a nasty storm which weakened and died over eastern Cuba and did not affect the U.S. Even so, it did some damage to our P-3 similar to that done by a similar storm in the same location several years earlier. The damage was caused by graupel and hail. It wasn't quite this bad in the Paloma flight, but close.

At this point I will end this blog and move on to other things. But be aware - we are less than four and a half months away from the beginning of the 2009 season. I'm sure there will

other tales to tell then.

Thanks for your interest. Hope you were able to take away some useful information about hurricanes and why/how we fly them. Had fun doing this. Ended the year with a final career total of 564 hurricane penetrations. Since that's the current world record, perhaps I should quit while I'm ahead. We'll see.

Thanks again

Inside the Radomes

2008-10-22T18:41:00.012-04:00

Back again. Did you ever wonder what we had inside those two radomes, the tail doppler and the lower fuselage radars? Well, take a look. Don't want to hide anything from you.

The tail doppler radar antenna, left, and the lower fuselage (LF) antenna, right, are being removed prior to this P-3 heading to Jacksonville for depot level maintenance - an 8-month overhaul where a full tear-down, inspection and repair will be done. At the beginning of June 09 we will get back a healthy aircraft which we can take out into hurricanes with full confidence of its integrity.

Click on them to check them out. Don't forget to hit your browser's back button to return to the blog.

Cheers.

Facts and Figures

2008-10-22T18:40:00.008-04:00

Sorry for the long break in my postings. Following Hurricane Ike, for which I made a couple of postings, we immediately had TS Kyle which was born just south of Hispanola and moved north. It was of interest to our research folks because it at one time posed a threat to the East Coast and thus needed an all out effort from our P-3s and G-IV. Following Kyle, we all took a week to get back on track as many of the crew were exhausted. So much flying had been done in the 30 day period that involved Gustav, Hanna, Ike and Kyle that many of the crew reached their legal limit of flight hours in this period that they had to receive a waiver from our flight surgeon just to complete the flights into Kyle. So, you didn't know there was a limit to how many hours any crew member, be it on a commercial airline or on a government aircraft, can fly. Well, there is, and with that and other things in mind, I thought I'd use this relatively quiet time (well, not too quiet - there are four systems in the Atlantic and Caribbean as I write this, but none pose a threat to the U.S. or are of interest to our research team) to give you some facts and figures about our flight program.

The legal limit for flight hours that any crew member, pilot, technician, scientist or whomever, may accumulate in a 30 consecutive day period is 120 hours. To fly more than this number one must request and be granted a waiver by a flight surgeon or physician so authorized to perform this function. Now, you may not think 120 hours in a month is very many, but try flying almost 9 hours each day during 15 of those 30 days, and perhaps you may have some feel for how exhausting it might be. Add to the flight time the effort it takes to prepare for each mission, and these hours become telling. As always, though, we manage.

If you would like to know what it costs to fly one of these missions on a P-3. Here's the story.

If we forget about what we called "fixed" costs, that's salaries, the cost of running the facility, etc., we have left what we call the "variable" costs. These include fuel, premium pay (overtime, weekend pay, night time differential, holiday pay and hazard duty pay), satellite communication (satcom) charges and miscellaneous expenses such as landing and parking fees, shipping, travel expenses, transportation, lavatory fees, facility servicing fees, etc. Dropsondes are a separate charge which we don not include in our flight hour cost, but I'll throw those in anyway as they are a mission relate cost. Already I think you have the feeling that it isn't cheap. Well, here's a look.

Operating from our home base at MacDill AFB in Tampa, FL, the miscellaneous fees are non-existent. So, it's a lot less expensive (I use that term rather than "cheaper" for good reason). That leaves us with fuel charges and premium pay. Here's how that breaks down.

On a typical 9 hour flight we will use 6,750 gallons of Jet fuel. At the Air Force base where from which we operate we currently pay $4.26 per gallon for this fuel. So that you don't have to do the math, that comes to $28,755, or $3,195 per flight hour. Satellite communications (Satcom) - on a typical hurricane flight this averages about $2,500 per flight. Premium pay can run an additional $5,000 per flight.

On an normal hurricane flight we will drop on average 20 dropsondes. These cost about $725 each. So add another $15,000 to the total.

Let's add up these charges.

Fuel: $28,755

Satcom: $2,500

Prem. Pay: $5,000

Total: $36,255, or about $4,300 per flight hour.

Throw in the dropsondes at $15,000 and the total rises to: $51,255.

On a given storm, we may do 8 flights in succession over a four day period, so inside of a week we've spent over $290,040 for flight hour expenses and another $120,000 for dropsondes. Ouch!

When we deploy to a foreign base, the price goes up significantly because of employee travel costs and all of the other miscellaneous expenses I mentioned above. On average, it costs a bit more than $5,500 per flight hour, not including dropsondes, to operate the P-3s during the hurricane season. As a comparison, it only costs about $3,360 per flight hour to operate the Gulfstream G-IV. But then they drop about 10 more sondes per flight, so the costs come out about even.

Thought I'd leave you with this. Although these costs are high, the value of the data obtained to improved forecasts and the saving of lives is far greater and probably not calculable. Like everything in life - it's all relative.

Season is winding down. I will probably have another posting or two to conclude this blog. I do appreciate your taking the time to read it, and I look forward to repeating it next hurricane season.

Thank you.

Flight into Ike Pt: II

2008-09-17T20:39:00.046-04:00

Here we go. Down the runway and into the air from MacDill AFB in Tampa, FL. The flight we are taking is our last into Hurricane Ike on Friday last (12 September), and it will last almost nine hours, bringing us back to this same base around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. As we takeoff from sun-swept Tampa, we are high on anticipation and apprehension of what we will face when we arrive at the storm just offshore of Galveston Island, TX.

Our Flight Director is up to the challenge, and wearing his "lucky

hat he settles in for the long mission ahead. His job will be to safely direct us in and out of the storm as requested by the two PIs we have onboard. During this mission we will make seven penetrations into Ike's eye before heading back to our home base.

As we head for the storm which is about to make landfall, we note that tropical storm force winds (>34 kts.) were observed some 250 n.mi. east of the center of Hurricane Ike and that hurricane force winds (>64 kts.) extended out some 80 n.mi. at the surface. If you've never seen what the ocean looks like at low hurricane wind speeds, take a look at the

picture to the left taken en route to the storm.

As mentioned in earlier postings, the profile data obtained from our GPS dropsonde is vital to unlocking the secrets of any storm. This device, which is dropped from the aircraft, transmits temperature, pressure, humidity data back to the plane twice a second as it falls through the atmosphere to the surface. Because it has a full GPS receiver aboard, it also sends back very accurate information concerning the location of the sonde as it falls, to the

surface, and from this we can calculate very accurate wind speed and direction. These data have proven invaluable to the forecasters and modelers in developing better storm forecasts. The technician at the right is preparing a sonde for launch into the storm.

Penetrating the eye is always the most interesting part of the flight. You are always apprehensive on the first pass into the eye as to how rough the ride will be. Sometimes the pass through the eyewall can be a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling experience, but on other occasions it can be relatively smooth. If you were looking for an "E-ticket" (remember the old Disney World ride categories) ride into a hurricane, Ike, in its latter days, was anything but. The seven penetrations we made on this flight were more like "B-ticket" rides, which for those of us who do this as a living is great. Some of the VIPs and media who flew

with us on the last few flights into Ike felt otherwise.

Here's a visual image of what it looks like on the flight deck of a NOAA P-3 during a penetration into Ike. The flight engineer, who occupies the seat between the two pilots, is adjusting the power levers (throttles) to help maintain controlled flight. You can see the radar image on the scope in the center of the picture. As you can tell from the second image, it does get a bit bouncy as you hit the outer part of the eyewall.

Sometimes when you are in the center of the storm you observe other aircraft who are in the eye at the same time. The Air Force Reserves from Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS are responsible for the routine hurricane reconnaissance flights, and we occasionally cross paths in the eye. Never fear. We maintain at least 2,000 ft.

from each other as well as keep in touch by radio at all times. The "spot" in the image to the left is one of the C-130Js that fly these storms.

Well, that's about it. To conclude this posting I want to share with you a few more images

from this flight. To the left is the Houston, TX radar image captured aboard the P-3 (Yes, we do have internet courtesy of

satellite communications) during the flight. To the right is the flight track of the P-3 during the mission, and in the center is the "master" hard at work.

Let's Take a Flight into Hurricane Ike - Pt I: Preparation

2008-09-17T11:38:00.009-04:00

Ike the hurricane is gone. The aftermath, however, will be with us for some time to come. I had the opportunity to make three flights into Ike as it crossed the Gulf toward Texas, and I want to give you a sense of what they were like, almost to the time when Ike make landfall at Galveston, TX.

As you know our aircraft for the most part serve as platforms for research scientists to acquire data that can be used to improve

hurricane understanding and predictions. As such, we always carry a Principal Investigator (PI) who presents the plan for each mission. The PI works through one of our meteorologists who serves as the Flight Director (FD) for the mission. They always put their heads together to work out details of the mission before the pre-flight briefing, which is held two hours prior to flight time. These two activities are shown to the right.

While this briefing is taking place, crew members on the aircraft are preparing the plane for the mission, which includes preparing the scientific systems for the mission, fueling the aircraft with almost 9,000 gal. of aviation gas, and loading expendables such as the Airborne Expendable Bathythermograph (AXBT), a buoy that is dropped into the water to obtain profiles of temperature for the calculation of ocean heat budgets. A couple of images showing these activities are shown to the left.

The final activity that takes place before takeoff is what we call

the plane-side brief. This, in effect, is a safety briefing during which all aspects of the mission are discussed and assignments made for duties that must be performed in case of an emergency.

And now it's time to start engines, taxi to the runway at MacDill AFB and take off. This and a description of the flight will be presented in Pt. II of this posting. Don't forget that you can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them. Just hit your browser back button to return to the blog.

And Along Comes Ike

2008-09-04T20:42:00.014-04:00

T.S. Hanna lurks in the Bahamas off of the Florida coast moving to the NNW towards the Carolinas, but no one in Florida is worried about her. They are looking beyond Hanna to a Cat 4 hurricane called Ike - a simple name for such a potent storm. And I can tell you that the people

in Miami are extremely concerned as it appears from the latest model runs shown here.

One can only hope and pray that the steering currents in the atmosphere will turn Ike to the northeast of South Florida and take it into the central Atlantic. As you can see from the

5:00 p.m. forecast track from the National Hurricane Center, it doesn't look good. All I can say at this point is, stay tuned for further developments.

We will start flying Ike on Saturday with one of our P-3s and the hight-altitude Gulfstream jet. Both will be operating from St. Croix, one of our forward bases in the Caribbean. Will I go along? It all depends on what the track looks like tomorrow. If Miami is still in the cross-hairs of Ike, my place is at home there, and there I shall be to prepare the house and pick up the pieces. I hope that such an event does not become part of this blog.

More to come.

Busy Time

2008-08-31T13:07:00.008-04:00

Busy? That's probably an understatement. When you run consecutive missions over a three or four day period with flights going out every 12 hours, it gets a bit hectic. While the flights can e dangerous and rough, some of the hardest work occurs during the 3 hour preparation for the flight. Preparations are orderly and proceed carefully using a well defined check list. After the aircraft is fueled with something like 7,500 gallons of jet fuel, the entire aircraft gets one last look over, a pre-flight safety briefing is held and engines are started to begin the flight process. The P-3s burn about 750 gallons of gas an hour, and with the price of aviation fuel being about $5.00 a gallon, you can see that the cost of a single 9 hour mission can be very expensive. That means you had better have everything working right, or you've spent a lot of money for not much return.

Although it seems like we've been at this for over a week, we are just starting our third day of flights with the P-3s. With Gustav moving along at a faster clip than originally forecast, it appears that tomorrow morning's 4:00 a.m. flight will be the last before landfall occurs.

While we continue to do profiles in support of our 3-dimensional horizontal wind fields derived from our tail doppler radar, we are also, on one of the P-3s, carrying out a very important mission to calibrate and validate surface wind measurements from the QuickScat satellite in regions of high winds and heavy precipitation. The collage shows in general how the process works. Ocean surface wind measurements obtained with this satellite have proven invaluable to forecasters in their efforts to more accurately describe actual surface conditions in hurricanes. This work has been going on for a number of years during both the hurricane season and in winter storm conditions in the North Atlantic or North Pacific.

I must say that we received a lot of support from the Cuban Government during the first couple of missions by allowing us to overfly Cuba to get to the storm while it was located in the Caribbean. This saved us a considerable amount of time and allowed us to obtain a more extensive data set.

Take a look at this Google representation of one of those flights.

When It Rains it Pours

2008-08-28T23:15:00.006-04:00

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.

Oh My!

2008-08-27T22:30:00.009-04:00

Oh My! Is it time to get out of Dodge?

It's becoming quite obvious that this Labor Day weekend will see a storm, perhaps a major hurricane, making landfall someplace on the Gulf coast. Will it be Katrina all over again charging into New Orleans? We'll just have to wait for a few more days to be sure. All indications are that a storm of some magnitude will hit someplace between Texas and the Florida panhandle. Just look at the latest forecasts. It's time to get prepared - today, not Saturday or Sunday.

So, what can we do to learn where this storm may go and how strong it will be when it

there? NOAA will be starting its flight program tomorrow with two flights, one on the high-altitude G-IV to map the steering currents that should provide us a better idea of where the storm may go. One of our P-3s will be going out into the Gulf with 60 ocean probes that will yield information on the heat available to intensify the storm. We all know that hurricanes get its energy from the ocean, and where you find warm pools of water in the

ocean, you will likely see intensification of the storm. By the end of the day tomorrow, data should be available that will help us with both our track and intensity forecasts. The tracks for these two missions are displayed here.

I will have the pleasure of joining the G-IV as it makes its way first out over the bahamas, then around Cuba and the storm and finally back to our home base at MacDill AFB in Tampa. At each of the numbered dots along the flight track we will be launching dropsondes from 45,000 ft., and as they fall to the surface they will radio back to the aircraft temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed and direction twice each second. These data will be processed onboard, and then the operator will generate a message with the key data which will then be transmitted via our satellite communication link back to the National Weather Service. These data will be included in the all of the model runs generated about 8:00 pm tomorrow evening, and the new tracks will be in the hands of the forecasters at NHC by midnight tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to the eight hour journey and will report to you upon my return.

Until then.

Gustav Updateñ

2008-08-26T20:36:00.007-04:00

Look at this forecast. Now the "official" track put out by NHC is in better agreement with the models. That's all except for the GFDL model which scoots Gustav across the Gulf in record time.

It's joined by the UKMet (United Kingdom Meteorological Group) model and the Navy's NOGAPS. Remember NOGAPS from yesterday? It was the model that sent Gustav into Never-Never land. I guess it woke up today. Remember to click on the images to enlarge them.

So what are AOC and the scientists from a number of groups doing to improve our forecasts. Well, we have set up a number of flights that begin tomorrow morning and continue until Gustav makes landfall. Please feel free to call our hurricane hot-line to find out what we are up to. Phone # and extension are: 1-800-729-6622 x3128. The ext. for G-IV ops is 3144.

Here's an image of Gustav to keep in mind. Small now, but potentially destructive later.

More tomorrow.

Now What? Here Comes Gustav!

2008-08-25T21:50:00.000-04:00

And here comes Gustav. Where will he go? Certainly the models shown here are having a tough time with it. The official track from NHC runs right up the spine of Cuba, but the smart (scientists) money goes more for the tight little group that keep it south of Cuba and carry it into the Gulf. (Click on the image to enlarge and hit your back button to return.)

So, we're off on another adventure. Our first flight out is at 4 pm tomorrow afternoon followed by a second mission 12 hours later. I'm sure we'll get the first mission in, but the second will depend on the storm location. If it does follow the official track, all bets are off. We'll just have to wait until tomorrow.

Feisty Fay - The Storm that lasted Forever

2008-08-25T21:30:00.000-04:00

It was two weeks ago tomorrow, Tuesday, that AOC deployed to Barbados to start flying what was then called AL92, as indicated in an earlier posting. The disturbance wasn't doing much, and many on the flight crew were wondering why we were wasting our time flying it. Well, Mother Nature has ways of making something out of nothing, and in that regard, Fay was born. Last Sunday my posting indicated that Fay was moving into its "end game," but how sadly all of us were mistaken. Please note in my previous posting on Sunday that the experts forecast Fay to move straight north and be well into Georgia by Thursday last. Didn't happen, and at this writing it currently sits over northern Alabama as a Depression, continuing to drop copious quantities of ran over a the SE while also bringing some destructive tornados to the region.

A better image may be the one to the left which was made just this past Friday around 6:00 pm as Fay slowly moved to the west across the northern part of Florida. Rainbands from Fay were still being felt as far south as Miami (over Mi Casa) and in Orlando at the homes of Sheila and Harry and Hilary and Brian. Sheila and Harry got around 8 inches of rain while Hilary and Brian got over 11 inches. It was a bit breezy at both homes, but they did not incur any damage.

As I mentioned, we continued to fly Fay after it moved north

of Cuba, executing two missions as it made landfall first at Key West and then just north of Naples. I was fortunate enough to be on the first flight which you can also vicariously ride along on courtesy of Google Earth. This is the track of the flight, which originated in Tampa and ended in New Orleans (we had to evacuate our base in Tampa), showing wind barbs (direction and speed) at our altitude of 12,000 ft. Notice that we came close to Cuba but did not overfly it. We had a clearance form the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do so, but the Cuban Air Traffic Control folks would not permit us to do so. I guess they have similar problems there - the right hand doesn't talk to the left.

We'll say goodbye to Fay anyway - neither feeble nor ferocious. Call her feisty and forever.

The End Game for Fay

2008-08-17T23:57:00.000-04:00

As we enter the end game on Fay, you can see at left that the model forecasts, this one from this evening at 8 p.m., that there is little consensus as to where Fay is going to go. The more reliable models are those bunched to the right, which certainly is not good news for Tampa. The official NHC forecast is at right, but you can expect changes to it over the next 24 hours. It's a tough call.

The P-3s are heading out on another cycle of 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. missions, ending up in New Orleans as our evacuation location. It's hard on the crew members as they have to leave their families behind to cope with the storm, but that's our lot in life.

The track for the first flight tomorrow is shown at the left. It's similar to the ones we flew out of Barbados, but there will be some added difficulty as we have to deal with the Cuban Government regarding clearance to fly in its airspace. We'll see how that goes. You see that the flight terminates in New Orleans.

And finally, the high-altitude jet, which has been flying

day and night for the last two days, will finish its set of missions tomorrow afternoon. It will be interesting to see what impact the dropsonde data these missions had on the forecasts. That will be determined after the season. The G-IV's final track is shown here.

Now it's time to wait. More later as we see where Fay goes and how strong she will be.

Fay - Will She be Feeble or Ferocious?

2008-08-16T17:30:00.000-04:00

Hi all -

After spending several days flying into the disturbance that is now T.S. Fay, it's obvious that we still have a lot to learn about tropical systems and how to predict their motion and intensity. From the previous posting to today's, you can see that there have been some major changes in the track forecasts. Look at the two shown here - one from yesterday and the current forecast from 2:00 p.m. this afternoon. I'm showing the spaghetti models from the Colorado State University website because they are visually better than most. The first one to the right is the 2:00 a.m. forecast run on the 14th, Wednesday morning. Compare that to the

model run this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. There's a world of difference. If the latest runs even begin to verify in three days time, our base in Tampa at MacDill AFB will be in the line of fire. The real question, though is how strong will Fay be when she arrives. Most models hint at a strong tropical storm to a weak hurricane. That's good news, but the longer she stays out over the Gulf waters, the stronger she is likely to be. For the record,

official 5 p.m. Saturday NHC forecast is shown here. You can check the latest official forecast by going to the NHC website at: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov.

So, what has NOAA been doing this week to better understand how and why these week systems develop into storms? The two NOAA WP-3Ds, as you know, have been in Barbados flying round-the-clock missions to collect doppler radar data from which 3-D horizontal wind fields can be derived which will then be fed into the NOAA hurricane forecast model (HWRF). Beginning Wednesday night at 11 p.m. and finishing last night at 7 p.m., these two aircraft flew four consecutive missions into the disturbance, the last resulting in the naming of the system.

To give you some idea of the type of track flown on one of these missions, here is the track shown on Google Earth for the flight flown Thursday night when the system was just east of Puerto Rico. The different colors represent different wind speeds and the barbs show the direction of the wind at each location. While clearly there was a circulation at the aircraft's altitude, 12,000 ft., this had not extended to the surface. Thus, it was still officially a wave. On the next flight during the day yesterday, Friday, a circulation was found at the surface just south of Hispanola and Fay was born.

Although the P-3s have completed their missions and will be returning to Tampa tomorrow, the NOAA G-IV is currently flying a high-altitude surveillance track out of our home base in

to provide profile data for the track forecast models that will be run this evening at 8:00 p.m. this evening. While the artwork isn't all that great, the track for this flight is shown to the left. The aircraft will first fly to the east of Florida, then south of Cuba, west through the Yucatan Strait into the Gulf and then back into MacDill AFB. The mission will take 8 hours, but the data provided to the models should give us a much better handle on where the storm is going.

My best advice to all is to stay tuned, watch the Weather Channel and be ready. I'll update this again when I have new material to post.

Thanks for your nice comments on the blog.

A New Beginning?

2008-08-13T17:54:00.004-04:00

The disturbance we are in Barbados to fly looked so bad that we canceled the day mission today. It does look right now at 6:00 pm this Wednesday to be getting its act together as you can see in this latest image. You can see that it is bearing down on the northern most islands in the Caribbean and should pass over them in the next couuple of days.

What is even more disturbing is the forecast track of this disturbance over the next five days. As you can see from the latest model runs, it is forecast to be just off the Florida coast in five days. At that time it may be a hurricane. We'll just have to watch it.

Off to the airport in an hour to get our first flight off into the system at 11:00 pm this evening. It will fly all night long, getting back into Barbados between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. in the morning. The second plane will takeoff at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow with the first plane repeating agian at 11:00 p.m. tomorrow night.

And so it goes. Stay tuned.

The Beginning of Something Big?

2008-08-11T21:30:00.000-04:00

Hi Everyone -

The big question on this date is whether the two systems in the Atlantic between the Lesser Antilles and Africa will amount to anything over the next week or so. To answer that question we here at the Center have been put on alert to take our two P-3s to Barbados to start flying round-the-clock missions Wednesday morning.

At the right you see two satellite images take this afternoon that show these two systems. The upper one image is the western most system located at about 13N, 50W. The lower one is at about 10N, 30W. They don't look like much, but we'll see whether they develop in time. The western system is shown as #1 on tonight's NHC forecast site and is colored red for having a high probability for intensification. The eastern system is orange and shown as #2. The #3 low probability (yellow) system showed up on the NHC website tonight and is not considered much of a threat. We do not plan to explore this system in the western Caribbean.

As I said, we leave tomorrow for Barbados - at 0900 local Tampa time. We should arrive there about 3:30 pm tomorrow afternoon. We had trouble finding rooms for the 32 people going down within our allowance of $164 per room per day, but our agent at the airport finally came through for us. We'll be staying at the Barbados Hilton Hotel.

Not too shabby, eh?

Stay tuned in the coming days for the continuing saga of what are called disturbances AL92 and AL93.

More later.

Just In! Bill Gray's Updated Hurricane Forecast

2008-08-06T21:56:00.008-04:00

Just in! Bill Gray, shown at right, and his colleagues at Colorado State University have just updated their forecast for the 2008 hurricane season.

In early June they were forecasting 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 5 major (Cat 3 and above) hurricanes this season. Now their totals have swelled to 17 named storms, 9 hurricanes and 5 major storms.

Since we have only had 4 named storms so far this season, their remains the possibility of 13 more storms, 7 hurricanes and 4 major storms. Still a lot of storms to go and about two months, give or take, to get them in. Time will tell.

At the Aircraft Operations Center, all of the aircraft and crews are standing at the ready.

More later.

Hello and Goodbye Edouard

2008-08-05T12:42:00.017-04:00

After a great week in Wisconsin, I rushed back thinking that my group would be deploying to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands on Sunday or Monday. Well, it was not to be. The system in the Atlantic that our customers were anxious about simply didn't materialize. Hence, no trip to the sunny beaches of the Caribbean.

While we were looking to the east, a depression was forming to our backs in the Gulf of Mexico. As it reached tropical storm strength, it was named Edouard - the fifth named storm of the season - and headed west towards Texas. This morning, Edouard made landfall in NE Texas and is currently bringing heavy rains and squally weather to the Houston area and to the east as far as western Louisiana.

The radar image above was taken from the Houston National Weather Service radar at approximately 1:00 p.m. EDT today, Tuesday.

So, we say goodbye to Edouard and await what comes next. At the moment, the tropics from the Gulf to the west coast of Africa is devoid of disturbed weather considered even slightly favorable for development into a tropical storm. We have a long way to go in the 2008 hurricane season, so we're not ready to toss in the towel just yet.

Some of you inquired as to how you might learn of our plans on a real-time basis. After some hounding by a couple of you, I"m giving you the number and extension to our P-3 hurricane hotline which is used to provide personnel here of the latest plan for the day. The number is:

1-800-729-6622 x3128

If you care about the Gulfstream G-IV, that extension is: 3144

Some of you also indicated an interest in the Weather Channel's interactive radar display which is currently in its Beta stage on the web. The image to the right shows the storm that passed by and around us last week. The display can be zoomed in or out, and various controls at the bottom of the display allow you to play, pause, stop, control transparency, etc. You can also put in your city or zip code and the map will go instantly to your neighborhood or wherever you wish.

This is online and can be found at:

http://www.weather.com/weather/map/interactive

This is not a link (I haven't figured out how to insert links yet - my next project), so you must copy and past in your browser.

Enjoy, and stay tuned for the next installment, which will chronicle "Fay," if and when she develops. Fay will be followed by Gustav and then Hanna.

See you next time.

Hello Dolly

2008-07-23T15:18:00.001-04:00

A funny thing happened over the weekend - well, maybe not so funny. The easterly wave that I talked about in a previous Blog, shown to the right, was moving west but not showing signs of developing. Our research partners decided they wanted to study this wave to look at its characteristics and see if there was any hope for it to develop. Known as the Genesis Module, this experiment has multiple patterns that examine the storm at various stages of its life cycle. The first of these, which was the one planned for our first mission, is a zig-zag pattern at mid-

(about 14,000 ft.). When a circulation begins to develop in a wave, it normally does it at altitude and then works its way to the surface. Hence the value of such a pattern. The orientation is along the axis of the wave and its position is where the wave was forecast to be at the time of the flight.

Well, Dolly continued to develop from that point, taking on the characteristic tropical storm look as shown to the left. We have continued to fly Dolly every 12 hours since Sunday, and as we approach the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the last of six consecutive flights is on the way back to our home base. The tracks into the storm have taken on a different look over the evolution of Dolly as shown to the left below. They are designed to acquire the best tail doppler radar set possible as explained in an earlier blog. Dolly finally strengthened to a weak Cat 1 storm this afternoon and does not appear to be getting much stronger. That's a blessing for those along the south coast of Texas and in Mexico. They'll get plenty of rain but not such high winds.

It's been an exhausting week for everyone, particularly because of the flight schedule. You are either on the 4:00 am or the 4:00 pm crew, and you start your day (night) at 1:00 am or 1:00 pm. Either way you travel from night into day or vice versa. After three, nine hour flights on this schedule the crew members are pretty well drained and, in some cases, down right testy. But, this too shall pass as we await the next storm where we will repeat the process. In the meantime, we have a few maintenance issues that we must deal with on the P-3s. They take a beating flying through those storms, and after three pounding flights into Dolly, they need some tender, loving care.

During the six flight P-3 evolution, our high-altitude jet, the G-IV, was also quite busy flying the dropsonde missions to obtain profile data to improve the track forecasts. It flew two

and one nighttime mission on Dolly, and as you can see by the figure here that the track of that aircraft covered a lot of area during its eight hours in the air. Each point on the track is the location of a dropsonde launch. This was the first flight in the sequence, and the subsequent two flights covered the Gulf of Mexico exclusively.

With the return of the last P-3 flight at 1:00 am this morning we are through with Dolly. As you recall from the previous blog, the disturbance that we had planned to fly from St. Croix and was written off as nothing more than a tropical wave finally encountered conditions that were favorable for its development into a hurricane. It appears that this time Mother Nature outsmarted the best forecasters. That's why we study these storms - to improve our ability to more accurately predict such events.

In case you missed Dolly's landfall into Texas, the image to the left is from the Brownsville National Weather Service radar. Nice looking storm.

Two pics of the aircraft involved in the Dolly missions - below is the Gulfstream G-IV preparing for one of its daytime missions with a P-3 in the background awaiting one of its evening missions. Above are the two P-3s together on the ramp at MacDill Air Force Base (our home), one having just returned and the other preparing for its evening flight.

The last picture in this posting shows the two pilots on the G-IV doing their pre-flight

before the mission.

Please click on any of these images to see an enlarged version of them. Hit the back button of your browser to return to the blog.

AL97 sits near the Cape Verde Islands, but at this time the models indicate that it will be turning north into the central Atlantic in the next few days and not be a factor for the Islands or the U.S. As this is the case, the author of this blog is taking a week off and heading for Wisconsin to a small town on the bay north of Green Bay. I'll resume this blog when action in the Atlantic picks up once again.

No Go this Time

2008-07-17T11:23:00.002-04:00

For once my forecast was right. The planned deployment to St. Croix scheduled for this morning was canceled. All parties agreed that the system was too weak and too close to the South American coastline to be of any value. Looking at this satellite image, I think you will agree.

So, we standby to fly another day.

Blog Reading Suggestions

2008-07-17T06:05:00.006-04:00

Some of you may be first time readers of my summer blog, so I thought I would explain the layout and how to get the best out of it. First, let me say that his is the first blog I've ever done, and I'm still learning the technique in preparing each posting. For instance, in my early postings I did not know how to embed pictures so that when you click on them they enlarge to almost full screen viewing. Now, I've learned a few tricks, and like the picture at the right, you can click on it and it will enlarge. That, incidentally, is a figure from the National Hurricane Center's website showing disturbed areas in the Atlantic basin and their probabilities of development as of 2:00 am this morning, 17 July. Go ahead. Click on it. To return to the blog, simply hit the back button on your browser.

I have a total of 11 postings so far, the earliest being in May and this being the latest. I encourage you to go back to the earlier blogs, oldest being on the bottom, to get a flavor of what we do here at the Aircraft Operations Center during the hurricane season. To get to the earlier blogs, simply scroll down or go to the right pane and click on one of the months so see the blogs for that month. If you click on "2008," you'll get all 11 of them from the latest at the top to the earliest at the bottom.

Hope you find this interesting and informative.

Is This the One?

2008-07-16T20:40:00.032-04:00

We've been asking ourselves this question. Is this the one? Many of us who have been around think not since this system is so close to the S. American coast and because there is a good bit of shear in the atmosphere - that means winds at high altitudes that rip the tops on the growing thunderstorms and inhibit any development. But, heck. We've been wrong before.

The two satellite images above were acquired today (click on them and use your back button to return to the blog). The one to the left is a visible picture which is what you would see if you were in the Space Shuttle hurtling around the earth. The second, to the right, is an IR (infrared) or thermal image which shows the cloud top temperatures - the more colorful, the colder and thus the higher the clouds. As you can see, most of the "convection" - rapidly growing cumulonimbus clouds - are just to the west of the apparent center of circulation. There really isn't much there, and that's one of the reasons many of us feel that this disturbance will not intensify into a tropical storm. But, as my wife says, I'm no forecaster.

Well, we are scheduled to deploy to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands (that's to the east and a little south of Puerto Rico) to start flying into whatever is there beginning Friday afternoon at 4:00 pm with the first of our two WP-3D Lockheed Orions, returning at about 2:00 am, with the second P-3 leaving a 4:00 am Saturday morning and returning at 2:00 pm Saturday afternoon. Crummy hours in my book, particularly since I have to see each aircraft off and meet it when it returns. We may repeat this sequence two or three times, and after bouncing around the sky for about 10 hours a day, three days in a row, the crew is pretty well done in. Even though we are on a lovely Caribbean island, there's not much enjoyment to be had.

The above shows the latest forecast track, taking the "storm" across the southern Caribbean. We'll see how this changes tomorrow morning and whether the storm is forecast to intensify. We'll have a final decision early in the morning as to whether we head SE to St. Croix or wait to fly another day.

That's enough for tonight. Still have to pack, and I have an early morning (3:30) get up - go ahead and shed a tear or two to see one of the aircraft off to Jacksonville for some minor maintenance that has to be done at the Naval Air Station there. If we go, I'll have much more to tell you in the coming days. For now, Good Night.

Is this the Next Storm in the Atlantic

2008-07-13T21:15:00.008-04:00

Bertha is gone - so it would seem. Is what you see to the right - the bright spot near 9N and 40W - our next storm? If so, its name will be Cristobal. Please note that names alternate between English and Spanish, the following being Dolly followed by Eduoard. Again, you can click on the pics to enlarge them.

The next diagram to the right shows the model forecasts made
this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Please notice that there are two distinct sets of tracks, one taking the storm into South America, and the other taking it to the WNW to the northern part of the islands. The latter set of tracks are from the more reliable models which hurricane specialists tend to rely on more heavily. We'll have to watch the development of this system over the next couple of days, and I shall get back to you on its likely path.

And So It Begins

2008-07-11T09:17:00.018-04:00

And so it began. The first true Atlantic storm of the 2008 season grew from a wave that emerged off of the east coast of Africa. Bertha, by name, was a surprise to all of us as it grew from a tropical wave into a Category 3 storm. There were two dilemmas that faced forecasters as they wrestled with a hurricane that formed so early in the season in the eastern Atlantic.

First, there was the rapid intensification of Bertha to Cat 3 - a fact that none of the forecasters predicted. The second dilemma had to do with the track forecast. These highly trained professionals rely to a large extent on computer model predictions as shown below for Bertha. From that, they generate the "official" track shown to the right. Earlier model runs showed Bertha curving to the north, but as time progressed, they continued to carry it in a more westerly direction, which began to get the attention of the public.

You can see from the picture of the model forecast tracks that there is some large disagreement among the dozen or so different models. Why such a large difference? Each model uses different parameters and different math to produce the tracks. Hence, the difference in the outcome. The forecasters usually rely on one or two models that they feel provides better guidance and then generate their own official track forecast. Once again, it can be seen in the figure above and as the black line buried in among the model runs shown above. (By the way, you may click on any of these figures to get an expanded look. To go back to the blog, just hit your browser back button.)

Today, 11 July, BErtha is still with us as a weak Cat 1 storm located east of Bermuda. It does not pose a threat to the U.S. mainland at this time but probably will have some impact on the island of Bermuda. An interesting fact about Bertha is that it formed in the eastern Atlantic so early in the season. Normally this does not occur until mid to late August. The last time this happened was 2005, and we can all remember what occurred that year. This is not a prediction, - just a fact to keep in mind.

Preparing for the Season

2008-06-16T19:48:00.026-04:00

(click picture to enlarge, the your back button to return)

Here we are nearing the end of June, and save for the short-lived Tropical Storm Arthur, the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico have and continue to be quiet. That's a good thing since we are not quite ready to tackle the heart of the season.

Preparing for our annual hurricane program takes a great deal of work by members of the AOC maintenance and engineering staffs because of a number of reasons. First, gett

ing the planes physically ready to fly into the harsh environment of a hurricane means that we must perform maintenance to ensure that they are in tip-top condition. Think of it like getting your car ready for a cross-country trip. You need to put in a lot of time fixing, changing, tweaking and cleaning to be ready for the season.

The two NOAA P-3s are over 30 years old, and while they have had the best of care over their lifetimes, they have aged and require more love and tender care than ever. Comparing the engine of your car with that of the P-3, the latter is comprised of a jet engine connected to a propeller (hence the name turbo-prop) by a very complex gear box. Lot's of things can go wrong with one of these engines, and each P-3 has four of them. Above you can see a mechanic working on turbine section of one of these engines while another repairs an electrical de-icing boot on one of the propeller blades. All of this work is done at the AOC facility located at MacDill AFB in Tampa, FL. We are located in Hangar #5 on the base - the hangar shown in the movie Strategic Air Command (1955) featuring Jimmy Steward.

The Gulfstream G-IV has all of its maintenance work performed at the Gulfstream plant in Savannah, GA. This high-performance jet with its sophisticated computers and electronics requires a higher level and extent of technical expertise and equipment than can be provided at

our base in Tampa. Hence, every Spring, between winter programs and the hurricane season, it undergoes a one-month maintenance cycle in Savannah.

Another reason for the flurry of activity at this time of year relates to the extensive instrumentation installations, modifications and upgrades that usually precede the hurricane season. Different projects require different instrumentation, so when we switch from winter operations in places like Alaska or Canada, we have to spend considerable time and effort in accomplishing these changes.

We are just about finished with all of this activity, and now the waiting begins. In the meantime, the aircraft will fly some test and calibration flights, and the pilots will accomplish their mandatory annual training requirements. From here on out, this blog will be all action.

Next: Tropical Updates and Mission Plans

Hurricane Strructure

2008-06-11T07:19:00.011-04:00

The picture above will give you a sense of what a hurricane looks like schematically, from space and from inside the storm itself. Hurricane Georges is used in this example because the three images shown in the center of the panel, a visible picture from space, a view from the flight deck of a NOAA P-3 in the storm and the LF radar image, were all obtained within minutes of each other. The two visible satellite images in the lower left, the larger being Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and the smaller Hurricane Andrew in 1992, show how much difference in size hurricanes can be. Even though Floyd was considerably larger in size, most of the damage sustained in the U.S. was from inland flooding. Hurricane Andrew, as you are aware, was the last Category 5 storm to strike the U.S., and even though it was small, its high winds and accompanying tornadoes caused a great deal of destruction in southern Miami-Dade Co., FL.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Next: Preparing for the season.

The Basics - III. Instrumentation

2008-06-10T11:44:00.038-04:00

The Gulfstream G-IV, with its relatively small interior but high altitude capability, is ideally suited for collecting profile data of temperature, humidity, pressure and winds from GPS dropsondes deployed from the aircraft as it circles the storm as shown in the figure of an earlier posting. The data from these sondes is processed and coded at the "Aspen" station prior to being transmitted back to the computer site on the ground where it is used to improve the storm track forecast. Other stations on the aircraft are the Flight Director position, the Main Aircraft Data Station (MADS) and the dropsonde station called AVAPS (Aircraft Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System).

Often I am asked the cost of one of the dropsondes. Weighing less than a pound but carrying some complex electronics including a full GPS system its current cost is $750. Approximately 25 are launched from the aircraft during each surveillance mission. None of them is recovered.

To save you the trouble of doing the math, that's $18,750 just for the sondes. But the data from each flight can improve the forecast by as much as 30 percent, saving countless dollars of preparation costs and ultimately lives.

The Lockheed WP-3D Orion, being much larger, can carry considerable more instrumentation as well as the technicians and scientists to operate or monitor them. The schematics to the left

show the NOAA P-3 and many of the instruments and radars that it utilizes for hurricane and other related environmental research activities. There are five major types of data that we collect on the Orions. The first is flight level data such as temperature, pressure, humidity, aircraft attitude(roll, pitch, side slip and the like) and navigation information such as position, heading, track, etc. Wind speed and direction are not measur

ed. They are computed from a number of other measurements and they are very accurate. So, when a NOAA P-3 transmits a wind speed and direction from the hurricane, you can consider that it is on the money.

The second type of information comes from the two research radars on the

aircraft. The lower fuselage radar housed in the big dome underneath the plane gives a map view of the weather surrounding us out to a distance of about 200 miles. The presentation looks very similar to what you see on you home TV, as shown in the image to the right of a well developed Hurricane Georges. The tail radar rotates around the center axis of the aircraft giving us a vertical slice through the storm. A typical image from this radar, taken in Hurricane Georges at the same time as the lower fuselage image, shows the structure of the eyewall and rainbands surrounding the storm. It is also a doppler radar which can be used to derive horizontal wind fields as shown in an earlier blog.

The third type of data collected aboard the WP-3D come from devices that we launch during the mission. Thereare two such types, one being the vertical profile information in the atmosphere that we obtain from GPS dropsondes as described above and the second being vertical profiles of temperature in the ocean acquired from buoys that we also deploy from the plane. Ocean temperature (heat content) is important as this is where the hurricane gets its energy.

The fourth type of data comes from cloud particle probes that we carry in a pylon suspended below the wing of the aircraft. These probes provide scientists with information about the size, shape and type of particles in the clouds surrounding the storm. Knowing this is important because as cloud drops freeze, they release heat which further fuels the hurricane. It helps the scientists better understand the dynamics, or inner workings, of the storm.

The fifth instrument of importance is the Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer (SFMR) which provides measurements from which surface wind speeds and rain rate in the air below the aircraft. This device, which is installed on all hurricane reconnaissance aircraft, is useful in providing forecasters at the hurricane center a map of surface wind speeds from which they can use in determine the breadth of hurricane and tropical storm force winds. During periods of hurricane activity you will see in the NHC's discussion on its web page, from time to time, mention of this instrument and its product. The NHC web site is: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/.

There are a number of other specialized instruments carried on the P-3s, but we'll save the discussion of those for another blog.

Next: Hurricane Structure

The Basics - II. Aircraft Crews

2008-06-08T10:45:00.034-04:00

In order to obtain the necessary data from these aircraft to support NOAA's hurricane mission we need to crew them with the right kind of talented people to fly the aircraft, operate the scientific equipment aboard and maintain both the plane and instrumentation aboard. When the aircraft operates at bases away from home, such as the Caribbean Island of Barbados or St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, it has the right people aboard to make it self-sustaining,

The crew makeup of the two aircraft is as follow:

G-IV (max. 11 seats)

2 Pilots

1 Crew Chief

1 Flt. Director/Meteorologist

1 Ass't Met./Dropsonde Data Processor

1 Tech. Crew Chief

1 Dropsonde Operator

1 System Operator

8 Total

WP-3D (max 18 seats)

2 Pilots

2 Flight Engineers

1 Crew Chief

1 Navigator

1 Flt. Director/Meteorologist

1 Tech Crew Chief

1 Dropsonde Operator

1 System Operator

10 Total

The remaining seats on the aircraft are usually occupied by scientists, observers or media. The G-IV does not have crew positions for flight engineers and navigators. The crew chief, along with the flight engineers on the more complex WP-3D, perform maintenance on the aircraft when necessary. The three electronic technicians on each of the aircraft both operate and maintain the scientific systems. The Flight Dir./Meteologist is responsible for the scientific conduct of the mission.

Next: Basic Instrumentation

The Basics - I. NOAA's Hurricane Aircraft

2008-06-06T07:12:00.024-04:00

NOAA utilizes two types of aircraft in its hurricane operations. The first is the high-altitude Gulfstream G-IVSP (SP stands for special performance), shown at the right, which flies in the

environment surrounding the storm or in which the storm is forecast to move. The track shown to the left was flown around Hurricane Dean on 20 August 2007. Flying between 41,000 and 45,000 ft., the aircraft serves as a platform from which light-weight GPS dropsondes are launched at locations indicated by the numbers in the picture. These sondes, which descend to the surface with a fall speed of about 3,000 ft/min. while steadied by a small drogue chute, radios temperature, humidity, pressure and sonde position data back to the aircraft twice a second. Wind speed and direction are computed from the GPS position changes. These data are processed onboard the aircraft and then transmitted via satellite to NOAA for inclusion in the hurricane forecast model runs. An improvement in track forecasts of 20 to 30 percent have been realized when GPS dropsonde data from this aircraft has been included in the model forecasts.

The second is the Lockheed WP-3D Orion, a four-engine, turboprop aircraft built expressly for NOAA in the mid-70s by the Lockheed California Co. of Burbank, CA. These rugged, powerful aircraft are derivatives of the famous Navy P-3s that were used for submarine hunting. They have served NOAA well for over 30 years in its hurricane activities as well as supporting

other environmental research programs.

The NOAA P-3s will be supporting several different hurricane projects this season. Operational support will be given to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and the National Center for

Environmental Prediction (NCEP), both part of the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS). Typical of the types of tracks flown into hurricanes is what we call a Figure 4 pattern as shown here for Hurricane Felix 2007.

One of the primary efforts this summer will be directed at the collection of Tail Doppler Radar (TDR) data that can be used to derive horizontal wind fields in hurricanes. Such information as shown to the left for Hurricane Felix (courtesy J. Gamache, NOAA/HRD) can be transmitted via satellite to the NWS where scientists at the NCEP will ingest it into their computer models in an effort to improve intensity forecasts, currently a difficult task.

In addition to the operational missions for the NWS, the P-3s will also support the NOAA satellite service (NESDIS) with flights into regions of high winds and heavy precipitation as found in hurricanes. This project, called Ocean Winds, is primarily directed at collecting ground truth data for calibrating the QuickScat satellite - a very useful tool for obtaining ocean wind vectors (surface wind speed and direction) from space. And, these aircraft will also support scientists at NOAA's Hurricane Research Division in their attempts to better understand the life cycle of hurricanes.

Next: II. Aircraft Crews

The Season Preview

2008-06-05T20:50:00.006-04:00

Now that we are into the hurricane season, it's time to get serious about what may happen this year and what we in the hurricane hunting business are prepared to do to bring better forecasts to anyone threatened by these storms.

The experts have spoken, and the range of their predictions are:

12 to 15 named storms

6 to 8 hurricanes

0 to 4 major hurricanes (Cat. 3 or greater)

Remember. These are educated estimates utilizing forecast conditions in the tropics, such as whether an El Nino of La Nina exists in the Tropical Pacific. Basically they are forecasts based on forecasts. Only time will tell how well the experts did in 2008.

To date there has been one tropical storm (Arthur) in the Atlantic Basin (Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico). Arthur was short-lived, but caused a great deal of flooding in Central America.

In my next blog I'll discuss the NOAA aircraft and crews while giving you an idea of the types of missions we fly, the data we collect and how it is disseminated and used by our clients.

Next: The Basics - Aircraft, Crew, Instrumentation and Preparation

Summer Blog - The Beginning

2008-05-07T12:21:00.008-04:00

Hello Everyone -

I'm creating this blog to hopefully chronicle events during the 2008 hurricane season where NOAA's Hurricane Hunter aircraft are involved. The season begins on June 1st, so don't expect too much prior to that date. The busy part of the season is in late August and the month of September, so that's when the blog will be most active.

I'm new at the blogger game, so bear with me as I develop this site. Thanks.

Next: The Season Preview