Hurricane hunter aircraft from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Air Force that usually track Atlantic storms have been running out of Hawaii over the last few days to get better details on Lala.
These flights are valuable because the crew can acquire important details that help forecast computer models better predict a storm’s intensification and path. But Pacific storms are less likely to damage inhabited communities, so the planes fly through them less frequently.
However, the lack of these informative flights in 2023, during the formation stage of Hurricane Otis, left many to speculate why forecasters were caught off guard by its rapid intensification.
“NOAA aircraft and crew are occasionally in Hawaii during the winter months gathering data on atmospheric rivers,” Keeley Belva, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said, “but are typically less available in the summer to be in the Pacific since our missions typically occur in the Atlantic Basin.”
With the Atlantic activity much slower this season because of El Niño, and with Lala so closely affecting Hawaii, it seemed helpful to forecasters to have aircraft fly rare Pacific missions to help more accurately predict the storm’s path and intensity.
This is the second time this season NOAA has deployed an aircraft to Hawaii for hurricane reconnaissance, Ms. Belva said. In July, NOAA’s G-IV flew over Hurricane Fausto to acquire data.
While rare historically, NOAA’s aircraft are not strangers to Pacific tropical cyclones.
The first hurricane ever measured by a NOAA P-3 was Bonny off the west coast of Mexico in 1976. Since that storm, Kermit, a plane flying missions into Lala, and Miss Piggy, another P-3 aircraft, have flown into 27 Pacific storms. That total does not include other named Pacific storms that the aircraft flew through but never strengthened into hurricanes.
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