Patrick Duran (SPoRT/ST11) participated in the annual Tropical Cyclone Operations and Research Forum (TCORF) at the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, FL 3/5-6/24. TCORF brings together hurricane researchers, forecasters, and aircraft reconnaissance personnel from NOAA, the US Navy, and the US Air Force to discuss recent research results and plans for operational hurricane forecasting and aircraft reconnaissance during the upcoming hurricane season. The forum provided an opportunity to get initial stakeholder feedback from the hurricane aircraft reconnaissance community on real-time situational awareness products currently being developed by SPoRT. These products are designed to be used aboard an aircraft while it’s in the storm to make decisions on whether to modify the flight track and instrument deployments to accommodate a pre-planned research experiment called a “module.” Conversations at the forum also led to an enhanced collaboration with the NOAA Hurricane Research Division that will incorporate SPoRT into a module designed to perform cal/val for NASA’s TROPICS constellation. A new collaboration also was formed with NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere to better understand the Geostationary Lightning Mapper’s detection efficiency in the hurricane inner core.
