Review on International Aircraft Reconnaissance of Tropical Cyclones

Aircraft reconnaissance of tropical cyclones (TCs) is the concept of dispatching an aircraft with a meteorological sensor platform in the atmosphere at the right time, right place and right altitude, collecting the TC related data with right instruments, and relaying those data to the customer in a coded form. The first country over the whole world is the USA, whose air force flew into the eye of a TC in July 1943 and created a legacy shared by other reconnaissance crews for almost seven decades. Taiwan, China, also launched a new surveillance program of DOTSTAR starting from 2003, and got encouraging results for TC forecasts, based on the dropwindsonde data. The obtained data by flight operation and resultant research helped to increase an understanding of TC structure and structure change, motion, etc., and to improve the accuracy of TC track, intensity and rainfall forecasts, and have got remarkable social and economic benefits. This paper tries to introduce the advanced technologies and abundant achievements of international TC aircraft reconnaissance, hoping to provide useful reference to our future TC aircraft reconnaissance.