Advancing Tropical Cyclone Forecasts Using Aircraft Observations - Monitoring and Prediction of Tropical Cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Climate Change - page 166

were subsequently transitioned into operational use to improve situation
awareness for the forecasters, and more recently to initialize and evaluate
numerical models. However, even though many of these technological
improvements were transitioned into operational use the pace of forecast
improvement is not keeping up with the increasing risk caused by tropical
cyclones (Marks and Shay, 1998).
2. Flight-level Observations
Tropical cyclones (TCs) have been observed by both reconnaissance and
research aircrafts since the first flight piloted by U.S. Army Air Force Lieutenant
Colonel Joseph P. Duckworth on 17 July 1943 (Sumner, 1943). The U.S. military
conducted the first dedicated research flight into a TC (Wexler, 1945; Wood,
1945), and a subsequent flight examined the upper troposphere of a 1947
Atlantic TC (Simpson 1954). In the early 1950s, somewhat regular TC research
was conducted during operational military reconnaissance flights originating
in Bermuda and Guam (Simpson, 1952, 2003).
Strong hurricanes Carol, Edna and Hazel in 1954 killed nearly 200 people
and devastated large areas of the Middle Atlantic States, New England, and
southern Ontario, Canada (Davis, 1954). These disasters, and hurricanes Carol
and Diane in 1955, prompted Congress to allocate money to the Weather Bureau
the following year to form the National Hurricane Research Project (NHRP); a
short history of NHRP and its successor entities is available online at
www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/beginning.html. In August 1956,
meteorologists at NHRP began what would become an annual TC research
flight programme (Simpson, 1981). The capabilities of airborne meteorological
instrumentation, data recorders, and data processors were limited, so the
information gathered during the first flight was not available for analysis for
several months. During the first 20 years of the research programme, NHRP
and two subsequent TC research laboratories used aircraft with advancing
scientific instrumentation capabilities (Dorst, 2007).
In the mid-1970s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) purchased two customized WP-3D (P-3) aircraft. Projected purposes
of the P-3s were observation of TC structure and dynamics, participation in
TC modification experiments, and monitoring of TC formation, all with the
goal of improving TC forecasts and mitigating damage and loss of life; the
P-3s were also to engage in the research of other vital meteorological and
oceanographic programmes. The NOAA Research Flight Center (now the
Aircraft Operations Center) received the first P-3 in 1976 and the other in
1977. Since then, NOAA has maintained the P-3s to be among the premier
meteorological research aircraft in the world.
When the P-3s were procured, basic understanding of TC structure and
behaviour had been deduced from previous research and reconnaissance flights,
as well as from other conventional data sources such as rawinsondes and land-
based conventional radar. The TC was then considered to be an approximately