The NOAA Hurricane Hunters took off at 4PM EDT today from Lakeland, FL for their final reconnaissance mission into Tropical Storm Cristobal.
Due to the asymmetric nature of precipitation in the storm, coordination of dropsondes and tail Doppler radar played an important role in providing adequate measurement coverage throughout the entire circulation. These data were ingested by numerical models to initialize simulations used to forecast TS Cristobal.
For this NOAA Environmental Modeling Center-tasked mission, the aircraft transected the system 3 times, deploying multiple dropsondes during each pass through the storm. This mission was supported by 3 AOML hurricane scientists.
>> Scientist K. Ryan
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