WC-130J “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft from Air Force Reserve Command’s 403rd Wing at Keesler AFB, Miss., have deployed to a forward operating location on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands to be better positioned to monitor a new storm system brewing east of Barbados that may become a tropical depression, the base announced yesterday. The specially modified C-130s fly directly into the storms, utilizing their weather-monitoring gear to provide valuable, accurate data to National Hurricane Center forecasters. Earlier this month, a Keesler WC-130J tracked Hurricane Berta around Bermuda in the first storm-chase mission of the 2008 season.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
