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 radar data and other data collected from the aircraft. These data will be used in operational numerical weather forecast models.
Below is the proposed flight track. The green dots represent the aircraft turn points. The red dots show the locations where weather balloons are launched twice each day, and the purple dots are where they are launched once daily.
