As Tropical Storm Danny continued to weaken 300 km east of the Leeward Islands a NOAA P-3 mission collected airborne Doppler radar data to use in initializing and evaluating model guidance.
The figure below depicts the aircraft flight track (P-3: yellow line) superposed on real-time lower fuselage radar and infrared satellite imagery.
Included here you see images of the horizontal winds within 180 km of Danny sampled from the tail Doppler radar on the P-3 during the evening of 23 August 2015. These images are at three altitudes (1 km, 3 km, and 6 km) and are a composite of winds from the P-3 Doppler patterns around Danny. Also plotted on each analysis are the locations of dropsondes deployed by the P-3 (plotted using standard station symbols). These analyses show that Danny’s precipitation distribution was very spotty and asymmetric, particularly at 6-km altitude, with the bulk of the precipitation covering primarily in the northern semicircle of the storm at 1-km altitude and in the northeastern quadrant of the storm at and 3- and 6-km altitude. There is still an indication of a weak circulation center at 1-km altitude, with strongest winds extending from 30-100 km north-northeast of the circulation center. At 3-km altitude there is an indication of a weak circulation center 80-90 km east of the 1-km circulation center and a shear line extending westward over the 1-km altitude center. The strongest winds at 3-km altitude were to the north of the shear line. At 6-km altitude there was no indication of a circulation center, just a north-south aligned shear line above the circulation enter at 3-km altitude.
All the Hurricane Danny radar composites at 0.5-km height resolution are available at: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Storm_pages/danny2015/radar.html