Category: Uncategorized

5th Anniversary of Hurricane Ernesto

On August 8, 2012, Hurricane Ernesto struck the Mexican state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan peninsula.  As a Category-One hurricane, it dumped copious rain across the Yucatan and southern Mexico.  Its remnants reformed in the eastern Pacific as a tropical storm. Ernesto formed from an African easterly wave, which moved off the African coast […]

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20th anniversary of the first ever dropwindsonde observation in a hurricane eyewall

For decades, meteorologists used dropwindsondes, weather instrument packages deployed from aircraft, to make atmospheric soundings below flight level.  Starting in the 1970s they used Omega dropwindsondes (ODWs) that employed the very low-frequency Omega navigation signals to estimate the ODW’s motion relative to the aircraft, and subsequently calculate the wind.  Because of the limitations of this system, […]

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35th Anniversary of Super Typhoon Bess

On August 1, 1982, Tropical Storm Bess struck Japan’s main island of Honshu.  Although days before Bess had been classified a Super Typhoon with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph (230 km/hr), the storm weakened considerably prior to landfall.  Despite this, Bess brought torrential rains across the most populated provinces of Japan.  A peak 24-h […]

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50th Anniversary of TAFB

In July of 1967, as part of a reorganization of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the Tropical Analysis Center, predecessor of the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch (TAFB), was formed.  This reorganization, overseen by Dr. Bob Simpson who was scheduled to become NHC director the next year, also separated NHC from the Miami Weather Bureau […]

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