As Hurricane Rafael moved northward toward Bermuda (denoted by black line in upper left of image) NOAA P-3 missions collected airborne Doppler radar data to use in initializing and evaluating model guidance. Included here you see images of the horizontal winds within the inner core of Rafael sampled from the tail Doppler radar on the P-3 late on 16 October 2012. These images are at three altitudes, 1 km, 3 km, and 6 km, using a composite of winds from two legs from the P-3 oriented southwest-northeast and northwest-southeast. Also plotted on the 1-km altitude analysis are the locations of dropsondes deployed by the P-3 (plotted using standard station symbols). These analyses show that Rafael’s precipitation is still relatively organized, with the bulk of the precipitation on the north and west side of the storm, but not as centered over the inner core of the storm as the previous mission. The circulation is slightly more aligned with altitude than the previous mission, but with a 20-km tilt of the center toward the northeast from 3- to 6- km altitude, indicative of increasing southerly shear of the horizontal wind over the storm as it continues to interact with the trough to the west. The strongest winds are in a broad wind maxima southeast of the center at a radius of 50 km at 1-km altitude expanding to 75 km radius, supporting an increasing interaction with the approaching trough.
All the Rafael radar composites at 0.5-km height resolution are available at http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Storm_pages/rafael2012/radar.html