And Along Comes Ike

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

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

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!

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

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.