The 23rd Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology

14D.4
BALLOON SYSTEMS FOR CONTINUOUS MEASUREMENT OF HURRICANE EYE PROPERTIES

Joseph B. Williams, Modelsym, Inc, Doylestown, PA; and K. A. Emanuel, M. B. Sullivan, J. M. Cameron, and J. A. Cutts

We have designed two different balloon systems that can be deployed into the eyes of mature tropical cyclones from C-130 reconnaissance aircraft and which should remain in the eye until the storm decays or loses tropical characteristics. One system consists of a balloon attached to a long drogue line, the lower part of which is buoyed on the sea surface. This drogue acts to stabilize the vertical position of the balloon several hundred meters above the sea surface; an upward displacement of the system causes some of the drogue line to emerge from the sea, thus making the system negatively buoyant. The highly convergent nature of the boundary layer flow in the lowest portion of the eye contains the system within the eye. The second system consists of a superpressure balloon designed to float at a nominal altitude of 7 km within the eye of the hurricane. This balloon would consist of an inner mylar bilaminate shell surrounded with a Teflon exterior designed to shed precipitation rapidly. Aerial deployment and inflation of the balloons will be implemented with systems currently being demonstrated in field tests. Temperature, pressure, position and vertical wind speed measurements will be made at 10-minute intervals and relayed to a ground station via a satellite link. Both ORBCOMM and IRIDIUM could provide low cost low power real-time links. The first field deployments of the systems are planned for the Atlantic hurricane season of 1999. We plan to post the data in real time on the World-Wide-Web

The 23rd Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology