Hurricanes: Grounded Research Flights, New Atlantic Predictions, and the Southern Hemisphere Peak

This is absolutely outrageous. It seems that hurricane research flights using NOAA's two P-3 "hurricane hunter" planes (pictured at left, image courtesy of NOAA) are set to be grounded due to a lack of federal funding. As Jeff Masters observes: "With zero money allocated to fund one of the most important types of hurricane research, one has to wonder--what are NOAA and Congress thinking?" What indeed. And this even as the latest forecast for the Atlantic in 2007, from Tropical Storm Risk (PDF), is yet again predicting a very active season: "There is a high (~80%) likelihood that activity will be in the top one-third of years historically." These long range forecasts aren't necessarily reliable; but on the other hand, there's no doubt we will have more bad years soon enough, even if not in 2007. Meanwhile, it's equally obvious that we still have much to learn about hurricanes, an endeavor in which the hi-tech P-3s play a central role. Does it only take one year with no landfalling hurricanes for us to forget that we still don't understand these storms nearly well enough to predict many important things about them, including which disturbances are likely to develop into full fledged storms and when storms will intensify or weaken? So once again, I am stunned. Apparently airborne reconnaissance using the P-3s will continue in real time, to aid in track forecasting, but research flights are another matter. It seems to me that all senators and members of Congress who represent hurricane-vulnerable states should be probing this immediately. Meanwhile, although we still have more than three months until the Atlantic hurricane season starts, we'll soon be moving into the peak of the season for the Southern Hemisphere. Things are quiet for the moment, but I'll be blogging if the weather gets interesting.