On this first day of the week as briefer I decided to brief on hurricane Helene which was located in the Atlantic Basin. The weather situation for the prior week was an active one with the Atlantic Basin seeing hurricane Florence, tropical storm turned hurricane Gordon and also hurricane Helene. Quite a bit of activity for just one week in that one location. The day before my first briefing Brandon Jones did a briefing on hurricane Helene as well at 0746 EDT and located it as follows:

"Hurricane Helene continues to slowly strengthen and now has winds of 85 mph. Helene is moving to the northwest at 9 mph. Recent satellite imagery shows that Helene continues to organize, and a very large eye (45-60 nautical miles wide) is taking shape.  The NHC indicates that the model guidance shows Helene on a west-northwest to northwest track over the next 2 days."

In my first briefing (click to open full briefing thread) at 1119 EDT Helene had intensified and was moving to the NW still at about 8 kts. and I used the early guidance wind table to illustrate the projected track and intensity of the storm and a graphic of sea surface temperatures to show that the storm remained over an area favorable for further development. I also attempted to include a reference to a future reconnaissance flight and the possibility of some vortex data messages for someone else to follow up on. As we'll see below the attempt was a good one though my lack of understanding on who sends these messages doomed it to failure, as Professor Grenci finally pointed out about 6pm EDT after several; of us spent the day vainly waiting for the message that never came:

First lesson learned early in the game: Make sure you know what and where you data sources are and where they originate otherwise you may wait a VERY long time to see them....if ever.

Later that day there was considerable activity and postings by several individuals, one that generated a bit of insight for me was the one by Philip Lutzak posted on 9/19/2006 at 12:30am CDT a portion of which is below:

"The strong winds forecast on the north and west sides of the storm are puzzling to me too, because at that forecast time she will be moving west or northwestward. If the strongest winds are in the right front quadrant, then the strongest winds should be north and east of the center. Anybody want to comment?"

The comments provided by Steve Seman and Prof. Genci really helped to clear up how the quadrants of the storm are referenced and defined for me:

At this point the discussion progressed to talk more about the difficulty of forecasting the track of the storms and why, and referenced such items at the beta effect which we covered somewhat later in the course. It also gave a brief discussion of the value of going into research meteorology and some possible areas that are wide open with possible topics (see the full thread for the details).

That brings to a close the first day's briefing and overall I felt it went very well, my biggest lesson was the highlighted statement above about knowing your data sources:

• Make sure you know what and where you data sources are and where they originate otherwise you may wait a VERY long time to see them....if ever.

With that in mind lets head on to briefing day number 2 Tuesday September 19, 2006(Click link to continue).