This is depressing. Bush's budget cuts funding for hurricane research flights. Living in SoFla the hurricane information has been very important and useful.
From Jeff Masters:
For the first time since NOAA began flying research aircraft into hurricane in the 1950's, there is no money to fund airborne hurricane research for an upcoming hurricane season. NOAA's state-of-the-art flying weather research laboratories, the two P-3 Orion hurricane hunter aircraft, may sit idle this hurricane season due to a lack of funding. NOAA's Hurricane Research Division (HRD) usually receives several million dollars each year to perform hurricane research using the P-3's. However, funding for HRD has steadily declined over the past decade, forcing HRD to reduce staff and cut back on hurricane research.
Now, this key form of hurricane research has been zeroed out by NOAA. It is possible that the National Science Foundation will step in and fund one P-3 research project, though--there is interest in taking real-time P-3 Doppler radar data and putting it into one of NOAA's experimental hurricane research computer models (the HWRF model). It is also possible that if the President's newly-proposed budget gets approved (which contains an extra $2 million in funding for hurricane intensity research), some of that money will go towards keeping the P-3s flying. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) does have money to keep the P-3s flying this year, but not for reasearch projects. Flights done for NHC would be strictly operational--one altitude, one airplane at a time, with the intent of providing center fixes and surface winds estimates. HRD scientists would be allowed to take research data, but would not be able to fly both P-3s at once, or do custom flight patterns to use the P-3s' Doppler radar and other advanced instrumentation to gather state-of-the-art research data. No follow-up work on last years promising field study that examined the effect of African dust on suppressing hurricane activity will be performed. And with the Air Force C-130 hurricane hunters receiving the advanced SFMR surface wind measuring instrument this year, it is questionable how much flying time the P-3s will get from NHC.
more at Wunder Blog: