Atlanta is conveniently situated between Keesler AFB, Gulfport Mississippi, home of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (the "Hurricane Hunters"),  the NOAA weather research aircraft operating from MacDill AFB in Florida and is also adjacent to "Hurricane Alley".  It seems only sensible therefore that we should provide a base and facility, for both our own pilots and those throughout the Noble Air community, from which to operate during the Hurricane season.

Originally the brainchild of the London Gatwick Hub, I have adopted it here both as a change from routine flying and as a vehicle by which we can operate in a multiplayer environment both internally within the Hub and also externally with the "Hurricane Hunters" of the Gatwick hub and indeed any other budding hunters within Noble Air.

This page serves as a source of information for those amongst you who wish to brave the elements and fly in extreme conditions. These flights should be reported in the normal way as Charter flights and the remarks section of the flight report should be annotated "Hurricane Hunting". Suitable pictures can also be submitted for publication.

 

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTRE: 

 Part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Hurricane Centre is based in Miami, Florida. Their website has a plethora of information on tropical storms, both current and historic, and links to satellite imagery and forecasts. You will need this information to plan your flights and organise weather downloads. A typical hurricane warning costs $200m in preparation, evacuation and lost commerce costs. Reducing the warning area could result in considerable savings and the high accuracy data provided from the aerial reconnaissance missions has improved the forecast accuracy by some 25%.

 

NOAA AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS CENTRE: 

Based at MacDill AFB, Florida the Aircraft Operations Centre (AOC) provides various aircraft in support of NOAA's mission as required. For our purposes the aircraft employed in the collection of environmental and weather data are the Lockheed WP -3D Orion and the Gulfstream IV-SP. Performance data and instrumentation data is available at this website.

 

THE HURRICANE HUNTERS:

Part of the 403rd Wing, the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, the "Hurricane Hunters" has 10 Lockheed-Martin WC-130J aircraft and is based at Keesler AFB, Biloxi Mississippi.     During the hurricane season, June to November, the Squadron flies aerial weather reconnaissance and tropical storm and hurricane surveillance missions in the Atlantic (west of 55W), Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in support of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami and in the Central Pacific for the Hurricane Centre in Honolulu. From the beginning of November to mid-April the Squadron flies winter storms off both coasts of the United States in support of the National Centre for Environmental Prediction.

 

 

TROPICAL CYCLONE MISSIONS:

When conditions favourable for hurricane development are observed, either by surface observation or by weather satellite, the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Fla., alerts the flying weather crews. Their job: to determine the precise location, motion, strength, and size of the storm, and transmit the information by satellite to the National Hurricane Centre.

The first missions are often flown at low-level, between 500 and 1500 feet. These low-level investigative missions are flown to determine if the winds near the ocean surface are blowing in a complete, counter- clockwise circle, then to find the centre of this closed circulation. This is the first stage of a developing tropical cyclone.

As the storm builds in strength, the WC-130s enter a storm at low-level, 5000, or 10,000 feet of altitude, choosing higher altitudes as the storm becomes more severe. The tops of the storm clouds may reach up to 40,000 or 50,000 feet, so the aircraft do not fly over the storm, but go right through the thick of the weather to collect the most valuable information. The Alpha Pattern flown through the storm looks like an "X". The crews fly at least 105 miles in each corner of the storm to map the extent of the damaging winds, and pass through the eye every two hours, continuing the pattern until the next aircraft is ready to take its place in the around-the-clock surveillance of the storm.

Hurricanes are made up of dense thunderstorms, which often contain severe turbulence and heavy rain. The eye is usually surrounded by a solid ring of thunderstorms called the eyewall, and is where the strongest winds are usually found. Sometimes the clouds and rain are so thick, the aircraft’s wing tips are barely visible. The storm’s eye, by contrast, is virtually cloud free and is comparatively calm.

 

RESOURCES:

Weather

You will need a weather generator to provide you with "real" weather which you can download from any source that you know including FS Real Weather from Jeppeson. There are a number of payware programmes available I personally use FSMeteo which is an excellent product which downloads actual METAR weather files and may be downloaded from http://www.fsmeteo.com . There is also ActiveSky 2004.5 or ActiveSkyV. Another excellent programme is GET WEATHER v3, a donation-ware programme which accesses the Jeppeson weather files and can be downloaded from  http://www.bearsoft.de

Aircraft

The following aircraft files are available at either avsim.com or flightsim.com:

FS98 :  wc-130-j.zip (Hercules)

FS2000:  wc130j2k.zip (Hercules)

FS2002:  wp-3d.zip (Orion) and  gulfivv3.zip (Gulfstream)

FS2004:  p-3c_.zip (Orion) and wp-3dvol6.zip(NOAA textures), sc130h.zip(Hercules) and mst_c130_keesler_weather.zip(textures)

Communications and Multiplayer

There are a number of methods by which you can communicate with each other during multiplayer sessions and also carry out multiplayer sessions. Experience has shown that the best methods of voice communication can be achieved using either Roger Wilco http://www.rogerwilco.gamespy.com or Teamspeak http://www.teamspeak.org both of which are available on the Internet. The former is  a Shareware/Subscribe product and the latter is freeware provided that you do not use it for financial gain. So far we have used Roger Wilco exclusively.

Multiplayer sessions conducted with participants all using the same version of Flight Simulator can use the built in hosting provided by the simulator itself. However if you are playing with differing versions of FS then FSHost http://www.chocolatesoftware.com appears to be the ideal server/software to use because it will accommodate the use of FS2002 and FS2004 simultaneously. In addition it provides a great number of extra facilities including promulgation of flight plans and importing flight plans from FSNav and also the ability to send custom weather data to all participants.

 

 

Updated:  20 September 2005

 

                   

 

 

 

 

 

 


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