NOAA’s hurricane hunter aircraft will fly twice today. The first NOAA43 flight of the day was scheduled to take off at 2AM Eastern (0600 UTC) from MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, FL. This flight was cancelled. This afternoon the P3 will take off time of 2PM Eastern (1800 UTC). The P3’s science goal is to collect data with the various instruments onboard including the Tail Doppler Radar. The data is transmitted to The National Hurricane Center and to the weather forecast models. Here are the proposed flight tracks for both missions. The dots on the flight track (shown in green) represent the aircraft turn points. The red dots in the figure show the locations that launch weather balloons twice a day while the purple dots are the locations that launch balloons once a day.
