NOAA’s P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft will fly a Tail Doppler Radar (TDR) operational mission into Tropical Storm Erika. The P3 will depart at 2:00PM local time from Barbados and fly a six and a half hour mission. This flight is operationally tasked by NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). This means that EMC has requested this flight into Erika. The Doppler radar data collected during this and future TDR missions will be transmitted in near realtime to NOAA’s hurricane weather forecast model. The data is then ingested into the model to improve the model’s intensity and track forecasts. 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.
