Intense Convective Burst Observed From Hurricane Emily (2005) During TCSP

Hurricane Emily was an intense storm that developed about 1300 miles east of the Lesser Antilles as TD #5 on 10 July 2005 and took a route south of Jamaica (16 July) and Cuba (17 July), then crossed Yucatan (18 July), and landfalled in Matamoros, Mexico (20 July). As part of the Tropical Cloud Systems Program (TCSP), the NASA ER-2 overflew Hurricane Emily early on 17 July. Emily was briefly a Cat 5 storm with minimum pressure of 936 mb on 16 July 2005 and it remained a strong Cat 4 storm west of the Cayman Islands on early on 17 July 2005 during the ER-2 flight. The ER-2 was instrumented with various remote sensing instruments including the ER-2 Doppler Radar (EDOP) that measures the vertical precipitation, vertical motions, and along-track wind structure below the aircraft. In this paper, we report on two ER-2 passes from which EDOP provided spectacular vertical structure of Emily's eye/eyewall structure while the storm was a strong Cat 4. We will present a preliminary analysis of Emily's precipitation and vortex structure from the ER-2 radar within the context of other available observations such as satellite and recon.