SCIENTISTS GATHER DATA DURING FRANCES TO SAVE LIVES, PROPERTY BUT ALSO TO ADVANCE RESEARCH

Sept. 7, 2004 — During the trek across the Atlantic of Hurricane Frances, NOAA collected specialized data that are required to support forecasting operations at the NOAA Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla., that go into the watches and warnings that help save lives and property, as well as the studies into hurricane track and intensity change. (Click NOAA satellite image for larger view of Tropical Depression Frances taken at 10:15 a.m. EDT on Sept. 7, 2004, as the still large storm moves very slowly through eastern Alabama and western Georgia. Click here for high resolution version, which is a large file. Please credit “NOAA.”)

The 2004 season’s hurricane flights are once again a multi-agency, multi-plane operation. This requires coordination of flight plans and aircraft use, and a balance between those flights requested by the NOAA Hurricane Center, and those requested for research experiment purposes by the NOAA Hurricane Research Division and NOAA Satellites and Information Service—each focus requiring a different flight pattern within the hurricane. This coordination requires careful planning with the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center, in Tampa, Fla., for aircraft capability and availability, flight crew requirements, and a constant readiness by NOAA and university research scientists who oversee various instruments onboard the aircraft.

“We can improve NOAA’s hurricane products by partnering with other offices and mount a significant field effort,” said Frank Marks, director of the NOAA Hurricane Research Division. “All of us work very hard to make this happen.”

The WP-3D, NOAA’s primary hurricane research platform, is capable of flying directly through the hurricane’s eyewall and conducting various experiments requiring flight patterns in many parts of the storm. “Miss Piggy,” the nickname for the WP-3D that flew into Hurricane Frances, carried a Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer, or SFMR, which is undergoing a transition to operational use by the NOAA Hurricane Center. (Click NOAA image for larger view of NOAA WP-3D Orions, which fly into the hurricanes. Click here for high resolution version, which is a large file. Please credit “NOAA.”)

The SFMR remotely senses the wind speed at the ocean surface—the winds that will affect property and structures upon landfall. Scientists with the NOAA Hurricane Research Division coordinated the development of this technology on the WP-3D for hurricane winds and provided detailed wind maps to assist specialists at the NOAA Hurricane Center interpreting this new data.

NOAA also deploys its Gulfstream IV high-altitude aircraft for synoptic surveillance missions in the environment around hurricanes. The data collected by the G-IV is transmitted to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction in real-time to improve the analyses in the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center’s Global Forecast System, or GFS. As part of a project funded under the U.S. Weather Research Program’s Joint Hurricane Testbed, the Hurricane Research Division, NOAA Hurricane Center and University of Miami work closely together to test a new automated program to draw flight tracks for targeting observations to get the largest improvements to the forecast models possible.

The program is being compared to the traditional approach of estimating which regions around a hurricane, when targeted for sampling, will provide the best overall forecast. Using targeted observation strategies in 2003, NOAA was able to increase the track accuracy of the GFS model by 25 percent for the model storm forecasts from data collected by the G-IV aircraft.

NOAA’s field program is augmented by WC-130 hurricane hunter aircraft operated by the U.S. Air Force Reserve 53rd Weather Squadron based out of Biloxi, Miss. This multi-plane approach to storm observation includes an intense study of processes critical to forecasting hurricane intensity, track and structure.

Intensity research continues to be a top priority for NOAA. This year’s effort, a USWRP project jointly funded by the Office of Naval Research, is the Coupled Boundary Layer Air Sea Transfer Program or CBLAST. In collaboration with the U.S. Air Force Reserve Command’s 53rd Weather Squadron, two WC-130J aircraft deployed 55 drifting buoys and subsurface floats into the path of Frances timed so that NOAA’s “Miss Piggy” could fly over the array as the storm passed over.

The goal is to obtain an unprecedented set of ocean, atmosphere and wave observations for use in the new generation of coupled air-sea hurricane prediction models being developed at the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center outside Washington, D.C., and the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey, Calif. It is hoped that this year’s experiment can pioneer a new approach to obtaining needed input for the new generation of coupled models by simultaneously sampling the ocean, atmosphere and air-sea interface using complementary aircraft and air-deployed in-situ sampling strategies.

NOAA is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and providing environmental stewardship of the nation’s coastal and marine resources. NOAA is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Relevant Web Sites
NOAA Hurricane Research Division

NOAA “Hurricane Hunter” Aircraft

Media Contact:
Jana Goldman, NOAA Research, (301) 713-2483 ext. 181