Climatology of Tropical Cyclone Reconnaissance Missions and Implications on Forecasting Storm Structures

When forecasting changes in Atlantic tropical systems, data availability is usually a limiting constraint due to the lack of observing systems in the Atlantic Ocean. Though remote sensors such as satellites are used to unshackle this constraint, clouds, rain contamination, and other obstacles limit the trustworthiness of the data. As such, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Air Force Reserves send out flight missions to collect crucial information, such as wind speeds, to capture characteristics about tropical systems and aid models in the initialization of their forecasts. To understand how much of a storm’s structure is observed by the weather reconnaissance missions, this research study aims to create a climatology from the last two decades of missions. This climatology will catalog the proportions of 34, 50, and 64-knot wind observations taken during each mission. With a better idea of how these missions have observed tropical cyclone structures, the next step in this study will be to evaluate which patterns led to the most accurate structure forecasts produced by the National Hurricane Center. Forecasts will be evaluated using every publicly available data platform, such as CMAN, METAR, and ASOS, at the time that the system is making landfall.