|
bird food bathtub posted:Stay safe hurricane hunter goon whose name I have forgotten. I’m actually on shore tour in Maryland, so no cool pictures unless I find some from the crews flying. Those guys just finished Fiona stuff yesterday and are deploying to Aruba tomorrow for this. It’s nice to have a break but I can’t escape from hurricane drama - I’m in charge of NOAA’s team that does all the post-disaster aerial photography. We just recalled the plane from doing coastal mapping work in the Great Lakes to save some hours and get ready for post-storm stuff. It’s nice and cool in Maryland now but the Gulf is still plenty hot, so that’ll feed whatever passes through there.
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2022 00:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:17 |
|
|
Air Force replaced theirs a few years ago so they’re good for awhile. We re-winged our P-3’s in 2016/17 so that bought us some time. We are planning to sundown our P-3’s in ~2030. I’d guess they’ll be replaced with WC-130J’s since the only other four engine turboprop out there is the Airbus A400. Our equipment configuration and mods will be a lot different from what the Air Force uses though. They only have a nose radar,drop sonde launcher, and a radiometer for measuring surface wind. Our next platform will have this https://www.eol.ucar.edu/instruments/airborne-phased-array-radar-apar since you can’t hang a tail radar or lower radome off of a C-130. Likewise it’ll probably have a bunch of weird instrument ports and hard points for hanging stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2022 01:30
|
|
|
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/news/noaa-and-saildrone-launch-seven-hurricane-tracking-surface-drones/ you can read more here. It says the sail is reinforced so maybe they are survivable, but I doubt it. Next time I fly with the guys from that lab I’ll ask. They also have gliders that will go underwater to avoid the worst of it. We also are testing dropping a UAV out of the plane to fly around in there. We’ve had mixed success over the years with that effort. Those definitely aren’t meant to be recovered.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2022 03:03
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:Tropical storm Ian update: things are looking ominous, and we’re running out of time for conditions to shift Yes I’m trying to convince my in-laws to evacuate from the beach in Indian Shores. The euro model has been calling it going into Tampa Bay for like a week now. GFS had it going into LA and then the panhandle. NHC was splitting the difference. The risk with the east side raking up the coast is everyone getting to enjoy some onshore flow and storm surge with major hurricane force winds. That could be coastal flooding from Naples to the panhandle.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2022 12:33
|
|
|
Thanks. It’s probably just as bad to ride out a hurricane out of gas on the highway than staying put… unless you’re in a flood zone. Pinellas county is Donny mandatory evacuation for zones A-C so that’s bad. They’re going to Orlando tonight through Friday. Should be far enough to avoid the worst winds and flooding. They close the bridges to the barrier islands tomorrow night I think. This is new I think and quite handy for convincing people to evacuate. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at4+shtml/223342.shtml?inundation#contents
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2022 23:53
|
|
|
 The hope is that land interaction weakens it. The hurricane force wind probability chart makes the wind threat more of an issue for that swath from Port Charlotte up to the wasteland south of Polk County. Storm surge will be an issue for everyone, especially on the north and east side of the storm. https://www.weather.gov/media/tbw/dssbriefs/dssbrief.pdf NWS is pushing the new threat is inland flooding from the 2ft of rain this is going to drop over 36 hours on central Florida. Stay inside, don’t drive if you can avoid it, don’t drive through flood water, evacuate if you are at risk for flooding.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2022 12:47
|
|
|
facialimpediment posted:Nope. Yes. People also go play in the new shallows and then get wrecked by the wall of water when the storm decides to push all that water back in suddenly.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2022 15:27
|
|
|
Was just about to post that. Nick is a giant dork but he’s a good follow for images and video from the back end. They also successfully dropped a drone on that flight. Not sure on the range and life of it but the target was 150nm. Probably difficult with attenuation from all the rain.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2022 19:25
|
|
|
Wasabi the J posted:Imagine if all their poo poo wasn't strapped down and tucked away. He’s not kidding with the lateral g’s complaint. I hated that - drifting and getting hit sideways feels so much less natural than getting bounced. Like you’re even more not in control than usual. Never seen the mattresses come out. Those are usually strapped into the racks that fold up above the galley table. So it was enough force to rip open the alligator clips that hold that up. I’m actually surprised there’s not more coffee, must not have hit a lot of negative g’s. That table gets covered.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2022 23:06
|
|
|
davecrazy posted:How do you fly on that plane and not think your going die the entire time. Those folks have balls of steel. It’s not usually too bad - inevitably once they have media or a congressman on board it will be super calm. Though turbulence and airsickness have never bothered me either. It helps to focus on your task as well. I used to have one or two flights a year where I questioned my career choice though. Glad I wasn’t on that one.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2022 00:21
|
|
|
I will say that the lowest barrier to entry is to be some flavor of journalist. I think in hurricane Harvey we had two randos that had a blog or something. I think that the PAO has turned over since then and the new PAO vets people more closely. They haven’t had media riders for the past two years but just recently started letting them on again. The worst part of those flights is how much of a clown car the plane gets to be. There’s only about 18 work stations but they can carry 21. When it’s packed with people it’s a race to the head after the seatbelt light goes off. And you can’t really go hang out in the galley without having to stare at some rando. And you have to make sure you don’t say anything too bad over the ICS. I miss flying with minimum crew for Covid precautions. We got it down to like 9 people once, which is sparse for a P-3 mission flight.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2022 01:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:17 |
|
|
We had one of our aircraft do a few quick collection lines in Punta Gorda and Fort Myers yesterday afternoon. Imagery available here https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/ian/index.html#11/26.5501/-82.1269 We collected pre-event imagery in the late spring across the east coast, gulf, and west coast for comparison, my advice is to use a computer and open the two maps next to each other if you actually want to do a side by side comparison https://geodesy.noaa.gov/storm_archive/coastal/viewer/index.html We mainly focus on areas with highest predicted storm surge and critical infrastructure, so stuff like missing bridges, piers, hospitals are the priority. Looks like the water has gone down in the neighbors but you can see where some houses used to be and boats stacked up in peoples yards. We’ve got a DHC-6 twin otter (much slower) coming from Tallahassee today that will target another coastal area on its way to Miami. The King Air is in Miami and will do another flight today. We will probably be at this for awhile. We keep a ground team on standby to upload and process data so it usually takes 8 hours or so from landing to imagery release on our site. Other assets that FEMA works with is the Civil Air Patrol and commercial satellite / NGA satellites. The CAP imagery is usually available off their site, the satellite stuff is usually not distributed. Hopefully nothing bad happens in Charleston and the east coast.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2022 13:22
|
|