Images credit: Benjamin Jaimes, Ph.D.
As tropical storm Edouard was forming in the Eastern Atlantic west of the Cape Verde Islands, a team of hurricane scientists from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) and the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science were taking to the skies to deploy a series of highly specialized instruments to collect critical information on ocean and atmospheric conditions along the storm’s predicted track.
For the last four years, UM Rosenstiel School Professor Nick Shay, a
SECOORA Prinicipal Investigator, and researchers Benjamin Jaimes and Jodi Brewster have been working closely with engineers at Lockheed Martin in Marion, Massachusetts, the manufacturer of the expendable ocean probes, to prepare the instruments to collect the valuable data necessary to help forecast where and when a newly developed tropical storm would intensify into a category hurricane.
On Friday, Sept. 12 when Edouard was a mere day-old tropical storm, the research team, including Jaimes from the UM Rosenstiel School Upper Ocean Dynamics Laboratory and UM alumni and NOAA hurricane scientist Eric Uhlhorn, departed St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands aboard NOAA’s P3 hurricane hunter aircraft. On this first flight they deployed a total of 27 of ...