Everyone knows, and our name does rather give the idea away, that the Hurricane Hunters fly tropical storms and hurricanes during the hurricane season. But a lot of folks ask us "What do you do all winter when there are no hurricanes to fly?". The answer is we fly winter storms.

One of the biggest reasons we fly tropical storms is to provide the forecasters with data they don't get normally. Except for the occasional ship or buoy, there is no one out there in the ocean to take weather observations or to launch weather balloons to get data for the forecasters and for the forecast models. The same is true over the oceans off the east and west coast of the United States as well as the Gulf of Mexico in the winter. And the evolution of significant winter events like the Nor'Easter that can dump feet of snow in the northeast US often takes place over water.

So NOAA will task us to fly winter storms tracks off the east and west coast of the US and over the Gulf whenever they believe that a storm might develop over those bodies of water that might impact the US.

A very typical scenario is a low pressure center and associated cold front moving off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico and forecasted to move east toward northern Florida and out over the Atlantic Ocean. Quite often in the winter, this system will then begin to track up the eastern seaboard. It will be met by a cold Arctic air mass over Canada. The energy from the warm Gulf Stream will help to feed the low tracking up the coast, much as warm water feeds a hurricane in the summer, and provide lots of energy for it. The clash of the warmer, moist maritime air over the Atlantic and the cold dry arctic air over the NE US and Canada sets the stage for wrap around moisture in New England and LOTS of snow. We call this system a Nor'Easter.

But in this scenario, the low that will become the Nor'easter will spend at least a couple of days over the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of the US before potentially dumping snow in New England so all the forecasters have to go on is the satellite images. And the models take very little of that into account. They depend on actual measured observations. So, just as we do for the National Hurricane Center in the summer, the Hurricane Hunters will fly winter storm tracks off the east coast at high altitude and release several of our dropsonde weather instruments along the track to collect data for the forecasters and the forecast models. Usually we aren't flying into this low pressure system but rather ahead of it to collect data about the environment into which this low will soon track. This helps the NWS better forecast the track of the low and in turn, the snowfall potential of the storm.

And that's how the Hurricane Hunters spend their winters!