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Air Force Hurricane Reconaissance Data (1995-1998)

OVERVIEW

The 53^rd Air Force Weather Reconnaissance Squadron stationed at Keesler AFB, Biloxi, MS, gathered the data described on this web page. At the end of the past several seasons these data were made available to The Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, Miami, FL, who have made these data available to The Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Team of CIRA in their raw unedited format. All these agencies¹ have spent significant time collecting and processing these data into the simple tabular ASCII form that is available here. It is hoped that cooperation of this type can continue to make these data available to the hurricane research community.

DATA DESCRIPTION

The ASCII flight level data are organized by year (1995... 1998), basin (ATL, EPAC), storm (A....R), and flight (F01, F02...). The filenames give information concerning which flight, and the date that the flight began. For instance, the first flight of Hurricane Luis is labeled F0119950902.DAT, meaning that the first flight was started on September 2, 1995. Data are available for 10 tropical cyclones in 1995, 11 in 1996, 6 in 1997, and 10 in 1998. Table 1 below gives the year, name, number of flights, and basin of each storm for which reconaissance data is available.

Table1: Table describing Air Force hurricane reconaissance data availability including which year, storm, basin and the number of flights (n).

`YEAR`
`1995`	`1996`	`1997`	`1998`
`Atlantic`
`Allison (6)`	`Arthur (4)`	`Ana (2)`	`Alex (3)`
`Chantal (12)`	`Bertha (15)`	`Bill (2)`	`Bonnie (16)`
`Dean (6)`	`Cesar (5)`	`Claudette (4)`	`Charley (4)`
`Erin (11)`	`Dolly (5)`	`Danny (11)`	`Danielle (12)`
`Felix (24)`	`Edouard (15)`	`Erika (13)`	`Earl (6)`
`Iris (14)`	`Fran (16)`		`Georges (19)`
`Luis (16)`	`Hortence (15)`		`Hermine (7)`
`Marilyn (16)`	`Josephine (9)`		`Mitch (21)`
`Opal (10)`	`Kyle (2)`
`Roxanne (19)`	`Lili (7)`
	`Marco (18)`
`East Pacific`
		`Linda (1)`	`Lester (3)`
			`Madeline (2)`

The data sets have a three-line header that gives a further description of the data set; when it was started, what plane took the observations, and what storm was being flown. These three lines are followed by the raw data fields of time (UTC), latitude (Deg:min.10^th s of minutes), longitude, air), temperature (^oC), dew point temperature (^oC), wind direction (degrees), wind speed (knots), D-value (meters), pressure altitude (meters), radar altitude (meters), and a data flag (0-256). The data are self explanatory except for the data flag, which is the decimal equivalent of a nine digit binary number, each 1 or 0 corresponding to a column of data. If the value is 0 (1) the data are good (bad). A short Fortran program that will read and quality control the data is located in the top directory and is named readreco.f.

DATA ACCESS

Data access is available via anonymous ftp (ftp://ftp.cira.colostate.edu/knaff/). Use anonymous as the login name and your e-mail address as your password. Once to this site the user has the choice of getting the individual data sets from the directory structure or grabbing a UNIX tar file of the whole data set. The program readreco.f and the tar file, fltdata.tar, are located in the top directory. If you have problems or if you find errors please contact me at knaff@cira.colostate.edu.

^{1A Special thanks is given to the men and women of the 53^rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, Hugh Willoughby, director of NOAA/HRD, for allowing CIRA access to this raw data set, Chris Landsea (meteorologist, HRD) and Ed Rahn (computer specialist, HRD) and the high school students of MAST Academy, Miami who have done most of the pre-processing of these data.}