Experimental Deployment of AXBTs during Operational Hurricane Reconnaissance Flights

The first year of an operational demonstration project was successfully completed in which Airborne eXpendable Bathy Thermographs (AXBTs) were deployed during the 2011 hurricane season from WC-130J operational hurricane reconnaissance missions flown by the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Mandated by the 65th Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference Working Group for Hurricanes and Winter Storms, the purpose of this 5-year demonstration is to explore the value of these ocean data in an operational setting. Promising preliminary results include successful deployment of over 80 AXBTs during flights into 4 tropical cyclones (TCs), data reception and real-time processing onboard the aircraft using the NRL Mobile Ocean Observing System, and transmission of near-real-time data to Navy and NOAA operational TC modeling centers. A description of the strategies employed, data collected, and use of the data in two coupled modeling centers will be presented.

In addition, operational and hindcast TC model runs were completed for cases in Tropical Storm Emily and Hurricane Irene with the fully Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling System (COAMPS® ), i.e. COAMPS-TC, which preliminarily suggested that the AXBT data had a positive impact on the ocean analysis used for the coupled forecasts. Furthermore, utilizing data assimilation in the atmosphere and ocean, the COAMPS-TC model was used to examine the impacts of the upper-ocean thermal structure on the TC track and intensity. The sensitivity of COAMPS TC track and intensity predictions to operational AXBT observations was tested, and results from data denial experiments will be presented.