NOAA’s P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft took off from Barbados at 2:00PM to fly a Saharan Air Layer Experiment (SALEX)/Tail Doppler Radar (TDR) research mission into Tropical Storm Erika. The flight track is shown below. The P3 will take measurements to understand how much dry air is interacting with Tropical Storm Erika. It will also collect data with the TDR to understand the structure of the system. 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.
