CHRIS URSO/STAFF
Cmdr. Carl Newman looks into the eye of Hurricane Irene from a P-3 Orion turboprop plane over the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday. The hurricane hunter program at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa could lose 40 percent of its budget as Congress looks to cut expenses.
By HOWARD ALTMAN | The Tampa Tribune
Published: August 25, 2011
TAMPA -- When an ominous-looking tropical wave morphed in a matter of hours into Tropical Storm Irene over the weekend, a team of pilots, scientists and technicians based at MacDill Air Force Base readied for action.
They knew that before Irene came close to the U.S. mainland they would be in a P-3 Orion turboprop plane winging their way over the Atlantic Ocean. While their mission was specialized, fly into the eye of the storm and record the atmospheric characteristics of what eventually would become Hurricane Irene, such flights are relatively routine during the June-through-November storm season.
That routine is in danger of ending, though. Facing a perfect storm of a lousy economy and a budget-cutting Congress, funding for the MacDill-based hurricane hunter program is on the chopping block.
A House appropriations subcommittee is looking to trim $1 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's budget, slicing it to $4.4 billion "with a big chunk of that coming from aircraft operations," said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa. She said the hurricane hunter program could lose 40 percent of its budget.
At MacDill, that could mean trimming about $12 million from the aircraft operations center, which runs two P-3s and a Gulfstream G4 jet, according to Bill Proenza, director of the National Weather Service Southern Region.
The proposal has brought a fight from Tampa Bay area politicians and those who track storms for a living. They argue the costs pale when compared to the lives and money saved with the increasingly accurate predictions that come from information provided by the P-3s and G4 flying out of MacDill.
"They have the most talented folks" at the NOAA aircraft operations center at MacDill, Castor said. "They are developing new science and advancements that have made tracking of hurricanes and storms so much more accurate than in the past."
The budget cuts, as proposed, would cut the hours flown by the MacDill-based planes in half, from 700 to about 350, according to Proenza, who called such cuts "damaging" to efforts to improve forecasting.
But in an age where satellites can peer down from space and tell what kind of golf ball Rory McIlroy is hitting, why do we need to spend so much money on airplanes, especially 40-year-old propeller driven aircraft like the P-3 Orion?
Frank Marks, research meteorologist and director of the NOAA/Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory Hurricane Research Division, said current technology still can't beat the visual and technical evidence collected by a small group of humans bouncing in an aging plane in the middle of a huge storm.
"You cannot measure the wind (from a satellite) because the clouds obscure the area you want to see," Marks said. "Aircraft are the only way to get good, solid information."
And while the Air Force has its own fleet of C-130s that fly into storms, only NOAA's P-3s — like the ones stationed at MacDill — have Doppler radar. That, said Marks, is a game-changer.
"The P-3 is the ultimate tool for looking at tropical cyclones," he said.
The aircraft have helped narrow the cone of uncertainty by as much as 50 percent in the past decade, Proenza said.
"For each mile that we can narrow the cone, that usually means we are able to save at least a million dollars in unnecessary business closures and evacuations," he said.
But even with the aircraft, there is room for improvement, particularly with storm intensity forecasting, say Proenza and Marks.
The P-3s — which, unlike the Gulfstreams, can fly directly into the eye of a big hurricane — are key, to NOAA's 10-year Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, which is headed up by Marks.
The benefits of improving intensity forecasting are even more important than predicting the track, Proenza said, "because you are getting into direct protection of life. It's not just a matter of narrowing evacuation. It is a matter of saying the storm will be of such intensity it will endanger life."
Marks and Proenza are blunt when it comes to the value of the planes flying out of MacDill's aircraft operations center.
"Take them out of the equation and our research is dead in the water," Marks said.
"There is a lot of support ahead for a lot of the concerns we are expressing," he said. "I am hoping that when the budget process continues, the funds will be restored," he said.
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