We begin our first flight of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season this evening. Our P3 Hurricane hunter aircraft will take off at 6PM Eastern (2200 UTC) from Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, Lakeland, FL, for a 6.5-hour mission into Tropical Storm Franklin. The flight was requested by NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center who are interested in the tail Doppler […]
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 […]
OPERATIONS Tuesday, 8 Aug. 2017 G-IV: No flights are scheduled. NOAA42: Is scheduled fly a Tail Doppler Radar mission into Tropical Storm Franklin. Take off is scheduled for 2200 UTC (6:00PM Eastern) to and from Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, Lakeland, FL. Three HRD scientists will be on this flight. Global Hawk: Is scheduled to fly a mission over […]
OPERATIONS Monday, 7 Aug. 2017 G-IV: No flights are scheduled. NOAA42: No flights are scheduled. Global Hawk: No flights are scheduled. Tuesday, 8 Oct. 2017 G-IV: No flights are scheduled. NOAA42: Is scheduled fly a Tail Doppler Radar mission into Tropical Storm Franklin. Take off is scheduled for 2000 UTC (4:00 PM Eastern) to and from Lakeland […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
On July 25, 2002, Hurricane Elida in the eastern Pacific reached Category Five status when its winds reached 155 mph (250 km/hr). Elida became the first of three east Pacific Category Five hurricanes to form during that busy season. It was followed by Hurricane Hernan (which became a Cat 5 on sept. 1st) and then […]
Summary: Scatterometers are instruments on aircraft or satellites that are used to measure wind speed and direction at the ocean surface. In this follow-up to a 2016 study, the surface wind in tropical cyclones around the world are studied using a large set of measurements from 2000 to 2011. The impact of tropical cyclone intensity, […]
