Atmospheric River Recon

AR Recon Data

Live Flight Tracking

Data below shows real-time tracking of AR Recon aircraft during reconnaissance flights, or data from the latest AR Recon flight. Left plot shows the vertically integrated water vapor transport (IVT) with magnitude shaded in units of kg m^-1 s^-1, direction indicated by vectors and mean sea level pressure contoured in hPa from the NCEP Global Forecast System. Lines on the plot represent the approximate flight track(s), dots along those lines represent the location of dropsondes released from the aircraft, and the open circle represents the last reported aircraft location. Right images show skew-T diagrams for each dropsonde released from the aircraft(s) showing temperature (blue line), dew point (red line), wind (barbs) and water vapor flux (black line) throughout the atmosphere. Plots on the second row show the integrated water vapor (IWV) with magnitude shaded in units of mm, 850-hPa wind vectors, and mean sea level pressure contoured in hPa (left) and 500-hPa absolute vorticty shaded in x10-5 s-1, heights contoured in geopotential meters and winds (right). The bottom row shows 250-hPa wind barbs with magnitude shaded in knots and heights contoured in geopotential meters (left) from the NCEP Global Forecast System, flight level winds reported by the aircraft (right) with aircraft and dropsonde markers as described above, and integrated vapor transport and sea level pressure as above with predicted airborne radio occultation (ARO) refractivity profile projected locations shown with blue lines (right). Note ARO data is only available in near-real-time from the NOAA G-IV aircraft. Aircraft track and location are based on flight level observations and thus may update at different times than dropsonde timing and locations.

Vertical profile data displayed here represents mandatory and significant levels reported to the National Hurricane Center, profiles with full observational resolution are provided when possible after IOPs and are available here for previous IOPs.

The raw data is obtained courtesy of the National Hurricane Center.

Aircraft:	Drop Location:

Data displayed on this page are considered preliminary and experimental and are for informational purposes only.