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BigDave posted:
Flying tonight at 0400 into it. 5 day forecasts are still not accurate enough - they can be off by 1-200 miles. That being said, it’s going to smack in the east coast of Florida somewhere, probably as a major. It’s going to run through warm water and moist air as it crosses the Bahamas and nears the US, so it’ll intensify as it comes in. By Friday the forecast should be pretty accurate. That same NHC page has charts that show the wind speed probability for your area and earliest possible arrival times of wind. Expect flooding and stuff as well. NOAA is also one of those agencies that still doesn’t have an administrator. They tried to put up that accuweather guy that wanted to privatize the weather service for it, but I think he was involved in some “me too” stuff.
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Aug 29, 2019 02:33
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 23:22 |
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I am a NOAA Corps Officer (like the Coast Guard but more obscure) and we fly P-3’s through the center at 10k feet. We have two P-3’s that do this, and a G-IV that flies around the storm and is boring. The Air Force has the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron that has 10 C-130’s that do similar missions to the P-3, but don’t do anywhere near the kind of research we do. We do fly typhoons sometimes but usually we are stateside for hurricane season here so we don’t hit the WestPac stuff very often. There aren’t enough crews or planes to have planes stationed out there for a long time. We have flown through stuff in the Southern Hemisphere out of Australia but we usually don’t go all the way out there for research. We all use turboprops for two reasons: we basically are flying through a wall of water, and the water ingestion will kill a jet engine. The other is immediate power changes that a prop gives you. A jet engine takes longer to spool up or down to give you a power correction, which is where the term “behind the power curve” comes from. A prop is immediate and is accomplished through changing the blade angle. We use this and altitude to adjust our speed to avoid stalling out or overspeeding in the storm. Both would be bad. We had a short mission delay so I’m chilling on the plane for a bit. Using the down time to figure out where to stash my family if the storm rolls over Tampa.
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Aug 29, 2019 09:47
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NHC’s numbers on it say the Recon missions (the ones that go through) increase the intensity accuracy about 40% over the past 40 years or so and the surveillance missions (that fly high and around sampling the air around it) have led to about to about the same increase in track accuracy since we started doing it in the 90’s. The new hotness is our Tail Doppler Radar. It is only on the NOAA planes and lets us basically stream off a 3D map (vertical profile that we hit from 4-8 sections as we pass through storm) This feeds into the forecast model runs and all of the hurricane centers get pretty excited for it. We and the Air Force measure surface wind speed with a special radiometer that derives wind speed from the sea foam on the surface of the water, we well as drop sondes that get shot out of the aircraft. We’ve also got one that they are trying to use to help with storm surge prediction.
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Aug 29, 2019 10:26
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Thanks for the words of encouragement. It was a strong CAT 1 with a concentric (double) eye wall. You can see the two circles on the radar. The inside one was like 5 miles in diameter so it looked like crap and we couldn’t maneuver in there. The outer one was okay though.  Eventually the inner one will go away as it strengthens. I guess it might be a CAT 4 before it hits land now?
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Aug 29, 2019 21:56
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It’s because it’s based on a passenger airliner from the 50’s. Also the P-3 was originally for ASW, hence the big windows for looking for subs. The P-3 started testing in the late 50’s and most Navy ones were built in the 60’s and 70’s. Ours were custom built in the late 70’s.
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Aug 29, 2019 22:45
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Wouldn’t use a P-8 for hurricanes. We had a discussion about props vs jets a little bit ago here but basically we would probably lose engines very quickly. Ours just got new wings, so the new end of life is supposed to be 2030. Most likely it’ll be a 4 engine turboprop again, so it’s basically C-130 or A400. The Airbus is probably overkill and would be hard to get with the Buy America Act probably. Biggest hangup with a C-130 is that all the extra radars we have on the P-3 can’t go on a C-130 without a complete redesign of the airframe. There is an established need to keep employing our radars since they seem to be the future of data collection in the storm. The tornado guys also like them (we were in Kansas earlier this year). NOAA Corps is kind of weird but I like it a lot more than the Navy. It feels almost like halfway between civilian and military, and I’m probably responsible for what someone the next rank down in the Navy would be doing. We fly with and are supported by mostly GS employees. Conversely, nobody messes with you like the Navy, and it’s more egalitarian and casual as well. Also we promote a lot faster so that’s not bad. Overall much better than my Navy experience.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:24
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Stravag posted:Maybe im missing something but i would have thought a flying boat perfect for this kind of thing because of the additional survivability if anything happened? Coast out of the storm if ppssible and land on the water? Youd still be in storm tossed seas so not a great chance but slightly better? You wouldn’t be able to push out of the crosswind without engines, and it’s probably super high drag as well. You also can’t land or ditch safely in the sea states that we see near storms. I will admit I was kind of disappointed we don’t do anything with float planes. We have a lot of marine mammal survey stuff on our light aircraft that could be cool for. Our primary light aircraft is a DHC-6 Twin Otter, which even has a float plane variant.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:40
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Flying_Crab posted:I mean doing OCS or whatever at 36 (assuming that's not past their max age limit) sounds like it sucks, but doing it as a civilian GS employee would be great. NOAA absorbed the US Coast and Geodetic Survey agency in 1970. We now have a lot of hydrography and coastal survey ships, as well as coastal survey aircraft. Usually we deploy one or two of our light aircraft after a hurricane to do survey work. Special cameras basically take a before and after shot, and they also will map the new coastline that the hurricane just rearranged. All of our aviation (and all of the NOAA Corps) falls under the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, but we basically contract out to the line offices to collect data. In this case it is Remote Sensing Division, part of the National Geodetic Survey line office. https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/RSD/rsd_home.shtml RSD would be your best bet for aviation related stuff, but NGS I’m sure would love a GIS experienced civilian as well. Those branches are all GS. I’m not sure of our OCS age limit, we do have some really old people. It is done with the Coast Guard OCS and then they tack some extra stuff on at the end. You are likely to go to a ship if you do this, possibly even with significant aviation experience. The majority of NOAA Corps officers are ship guys. About to head in for another flight, you can follow the plane do stupid stuff on here. https://airbornescience.nasa.gov/tracker/#!/map?callsign=NOAA42&mapid=Dark%20Gray&zoom=10&lat=27.9859&lng=-82.0176 Wonder Free fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Aug 30, 2019 |
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Aug 30, 2019 06:21
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https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at5+shtml/024334.shtml?cone#contents Maybe watch out if you are in Coastal South Carolina now. Or anywhere on the east coast leading up to it. Forecast model guidance seems to finally agree that it’ll turn north off the Florida coast and not make real landfall until South Carolina. 5 days out is too early to really know though. Maybe a CAT 5 today, this thing is moving so slow it’s picking up a ton of energy from all the warm water.
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Aug 31, 2019 08:58
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 23:22 |
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This was my third flight into it. 12 penetrations so far. We had CAT 5 winds briefly but not enough for NHC to upgrade get. It will get there. Pretty good stadium effect today. Surface was totally obscured though.  
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Aug 31, 2019 17:32
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