Cyclenall wrote:Abdullah wrote:Didn't see any comments about this insane dropsonde drop that just came in
https://i.imgur.com/weIuqhr.png
Data is from an hour and a half ago
What is this indicative of, though?
Bumping this from earlier, I'd like to know what that means too? I've just started reading into those charts but the temp doesn't change with height here. Insane winds throughout the column as well?
As a aside, I was reading some of the Wilma thread and noticed many were fearful for Tampa around the day before she exploded. Some users from Tampa, I don't see posting anymore.
This is an instrument (dropsonde) that is dropped from the aircraft that measures temperature (red line) and dewpoint (green line), wind (the barbs on the right side), and pressure as it falls through the atmosphere and transmits the data back. The temperature and humidity can be useful to show saturation (not particularly useful for the eyewall since naturally the whole profile will typically be saturated in heavy rain)... but can be useful for the eye sounding as it can show if there is significant drying and/or warming due to subsidence in the eye.
The wind estimates (which are derived rom GPS) are instantaneous measurements of winds (so technicallymore representative of gusts than the longer-time averaged flight-lvl winds) through the lower atmosphere. They can be useful to see the degree of momentum transfer within the eyewall and are another data point NHC can use (along with the flight-lvl winds and SFMR estimates) to determine what winds to go with for their advisory. But as I mentioned it only measures the instantaneous winds as the sonde descends towards the surface so it may not be representative of the 1 minute sustained winds the NHC uses as their measurement.
Also the ones they drop in the eye are useful for giving a more robust estimate of the central pressure of the storm than the extrapolated measurements they get from the aircraft.
