BYLINE: Robert C. Jones Jr.
Newswise — They will again venture into the maelstrom this year, with the goal of helping to save lives always front and center.
With the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicting another active hurricane season, the agency’s Hurricane Hunters will continue to fly into the heart of powerful tropical cyclones that threaten U.S. coastlines, gathering vital data that other instruments like drones and satellites cannot obtain.
Last season tested the team’s mettle. A total of 18 named storms, 11 of which were hurricanes and five of which were major cyclones, made the season the third costliest on record.
“All told, we flew 67 missions—521 total flight hours—into eight different tropical cyclones, which added up to the equivalent of flying around the Earth more than seven times,” said Jason Dunion, a meteorologist with the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) and the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
This season, Dunion will play a critical role on NOAA’s Hurricane Field Program, conducting daily map discussions used to help focus field efforts and supporting Hurricane Hunter missions both from the ground and onboard aircraft.
Here’s what the team learned from last season and how they will employ their newfound knowledge this year.
- A new laser instrument for measuring hurricane winds: “We started engineering efforts for installing a new laser instrument on the NOAA P-3 Hurricane Hunters,” Dunion said. “The airborne doppler lidar (ADL) measures winds below the aircraft by detecting the motion of aerosols and air molecules. We completed the engineering assessment back in the fall, and ADL will be flying on one of our P-3s this hurricane season.”
- Tail Doppler Radar: “We’ve been working to improve the tail doppler radar (TDR) systems that fly onboard the NOAA P-3 and G-IV Hurricane Hunters,” Dunion said. “The TDR provides a 3-D CAT scan of the winds and precipitation in a hurricane from just above the ocean to the very top of the storm near the stratosphere. This season we’ll be testing new automation software that will streamline TDR processing and help us get the data into our forecast models and into the hands of forecasters at the National Hurricane Center faster than ever before.”
- Black Swift S0 uncrewed aircraft systems: “We successfully deployed 17 Black Swift S0 drones from the NOAA P-3s last summer,” Dunion explained. “These Black Swift S0s were deployed into the inner cores of several hurricanes and typically flew for about 60 to 90 minutes. The flights allowed us to test the capabilities of these drones and to design flight patterns that will help us get the biggest bang for the buck as far as providing important data to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center and providing valuable data for research. We plan to deploy several Black Swift S0s again this hurricane season and will use lessons learned from 2024 to help us get the most from these flights.”
- Skyfora StreamSondes: “We successfully tested a new ultra-lightweight dropsonde called a StreamSonde last summer,” Dunion said. “With more deployments planned this season, we’ll use lessons learned from 2024 to improve our capability to sample the hurricane environment, especially the ability to swarm regions of the storm with dozens of Streamsondes. This swarm sampling could provide important high-resolution data in areas of the hurricane like the eyewall and near surface that we need to better understand.”
