HRD successfully completed their last research NOAA P-3 mission into Invest 95E, located in the East Pacific, today collecting valuable data that will help towards better understanding how tropical storms develop. The data from the flight reveals the complicated circulation structure in developing storms and their link to precipitation (rainfall) processes, which are critical to forming a hurricane. The flight finished off a sequence of four missions over the past four days into the potentially developing disturbance in support of the Genesis Stage Precipitation Mode experiment of the Hurricane Field Program – Intensify Forecast Experiment (IFEX), a sequence that saw two collaborative research flights with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) / National Science Foundation (NSF) Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) Experiment team and their G-V airplane. The collaborative sampling is historically some of the most ever in a developing storm in the East Pacific. HRD is thankful to NOAA P-3 flight crews for their hard work and, as always, outstanding efforts at flying these missions safely and making them a success.
Below: Example of data collected during today’s P-3 research mission into EP95 from the Doppler radar, showing the reflectivity (intensity of the rain) and winds at 2 km (about 6500 ft) and 5 km (about 16,500 ft) in the atmosphere.
