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Contributed by Neal Dorst

In the Atlantic basin (Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea) and in the eastern and central Pacific, as required, hurricane reconnaissance is carried out by two government agencies

• U.S. Air Force Reserves' 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron
• NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center.

USAF

The 53rd WRS is based at Keesler AFB in Mississippi and maintains a fleet of ten WC-130 planes. These cargo airframes have been modified to carry weather instruments to measure wind, pressure, temperature and dew point as well as drop instrumented sondes and make other observations.

NOAA

AOC is presently based at MacDill AFB in Tampa, Florida and among its fleet of planes has two P-3 Orions, originally made as Navy sub hunters, but modified to include three radars as well as a suite of meteorological instruments and dropsonde capability. Starting in 1996 AOC added to its fleet a Gulfstream IV jet that is able to make hurricane observations from much higher altitudes (up to 45,000 feet). It is used primarily to drop sondes around the hurricane's environment to measure synoptic-scale parameters in the usually data-free oceanic areas.

The USAF planes are the workhorses of the hurricane hunting effort. They are often deployed to a forward base, such as Antigua, and carry out most of the reconnaissance of developing waves and depressions. Their mission in these situations is to look for signs of a closed circulation and any strengthening or organizing that the storm might be showing. This information is relayed by satellite to the OAR for the hurricane specialists to evaluate.

The NOAA planes are more highly instrumented and are generally reserved for when developed hurricanes are threatening landfall, especially on U.S. territory. They are also used to conduct scientific research on storms.

The planes carry between six to fifteen people, both the flight crew and the meteorologists. Flight crews consist of a pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, navigator, and electrical technicians. The weather crew might consist of a flight meteorologist, lead project scientist, cloud physicist, radar specialist, and dropsonde operators.

The primary purpose of reconnaissance is to track the center of circulation, these are the co-ordinates that the National Hurricane Center issues, and to measure the maximum winds. But the crews are also evaluating the storm's size, structure, and development and this information is also relayed to NHC via radio and satellite link. Most of this data, which is critical in determining the hurricane's threat, cannot be obtained from satellite.