What Was the Bumpiest Flight Ever on NOAA’s WP-3D Hurricane Hunter Aircraft?

Motivated by experiencing extreme turbulence during a mission into Hurricane Ian (2022), this project develops a novel “bumpiness index” to objectively quantify the three-dimensional turbulence felt by scientists, pilots, and crew members experience on NOAA’s WP-3D (P-3) Orion Hurricane Hunter aircraft missions. The bumpiness is derived using physics first principles and accounts for translational and rotational accelerations about an aircraft’s three Cartesian axes. To rank the bumpiest flights in recent history, we gather flight-level data from every tropical cyclone mission on the P-3 since 2004. The objective algorithm indeed shows that the flight through Hurricane Ian was the most turbulent over that period.

For some of the bumpiest flights, we will compare each direction the extreme turbulence was in (up-down, front-back, or side-side). Since we linked each flight to the closest-in-time, SHIPS diagnostic file, we will also show which storm and environmental characteristics (such as storm intensity, intensity change, and wind shear magnitude) are prone to extreme turbulence. The results of this innovative technique to compute turbulence may help the safety of crews as well as better prepare them for turbulence in future missions.