| I was taking a look at the recon Plan of the Day from: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/recon.php And saw that in addition to fixing a tropical storm in the East Pacific, there are also research missions going on over there.
Then I started looking into it because I like to add dropsonde data for whatever I can, though I can't find the raw text data online. Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) From the mission page: "The tropical East Pacific exhibits a number of meteorological mysteries: What determines the distribution of deep atmospheric convection in this region, including especially its day-to-day variability? Why does higher rainfall occur over lower sea surface temperatures? Why do easterly waves form and/or intensify in the far East Pacific off the coasts of Central America and Colombia? We hypothesize that the answers to all three of these questions lie in the mechanisms that govern the interaction of convection with its surroundings. Observations in the tropical West Pacific, the Western Atlantic, and the Caribbean, as well as cloud resolving models of convection suggest that convection outside of the cores of intense tropical cyclones responds to three thermodynamic factors: stronger surface heat and moisture fluxes, increased column relative humidity of the troposphere, and decreased moist convective instability. The last factor is counter-intuitive, but is well supported by observations and modeling. We propose to test this hypothesis in the East Pacific and extreme SW Caribbean by using the NSF/NCAR Gulfstream-V aircraft to deploy gridded patterns of dropsondes and measure profiles of radar reflectivity and Doppler particle velocity with a W-band radar. The dropsonde measurements will allow us to evaluate the above thermodynamic forcing mechanisms. In addition, they will yield the mesoscale patterns of vertical mass flux and thermodynamic budgets needed to evaluate the response of convection to the forcing and the feedback of the resulting convection on its surroundings. The radar measurements will document the cloud physical characteristics of the convection that are needed to understand rain formation in these clouds." From: https://www.eol.ucar.edu/field_projects/otrec But they do have a lot of data online. They have a live map with data, including flight path and a camera on the plane that is available every few minutes: http://catalog.eol.ucar.edu/maps/otrec For camera, click "NSF/NCAR GV Camera Imagery" under Camera in right column. Really neat! More data from previous missions: http://catalog.eol.ucar.edu/otrec/missions I could only found images from dropsonde data on the site. (skew-t plots) Lots of various information on that project there. And based on imagery they have on that site that they are getting from Colombia, I noticed there are two Colombia radars that are not on my radar map yet, so now I'm off to go search for them. http://www.pronosticosyalertas.gov.co/imagenes-de-radar |