AN aircraft from the US National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration was due to leave Shannon early this morning to fly into the eye of a storm brewing more than 150 miles out in the Atlantic.
The flight is part of a multi million pound international scientific experiment named FASTEX. This was launched at the airport yesterday by the Minister of State at the Department of Transport, Energy and Communications, Mr Emmet Stagg.
Met Eireann and Aer Rianta will co operate with some 150 scientists and technicians from meteorological services in France, Britain and the US over the next two months in one of the largest weather experiments ever.
The operation is based at Shannon, where special radar and computer equipment has been installed in the hope of averting storm damage costing billions of pounds.
Mr Stagg congratulated the scientists on their work and said that extra tropical cyclonic depressions, which develop off the eastern seaboard of North America and intensify as they move across the Atlantic, are of critical importance for weather forecasting in Europe.
Prof Keith Browning of the University of Reading, who is coordinator, said that the storm of October 15th, 1987, caused over £1 billion in insurance claims in Britain alone. It was reported that forecasters blamed their failure to predict the arrival of this storm on the lack of weather information from the mid Atlantic after the withdrawal of several permanent weather ships.
A storm in January 1990, Prof Browning said, resulted in £5 billion in insurance claims.
He said that if FASTEX succeeded in reversing this trend it could change the way forecasts are made. "In future, we may do more targeted observation by flying aircraft to where the action is."
The Lockheed P3 Orion turbo prop, which was due to leave Shannon this morning, flew into the eye of hurricane Victor Hugo off the southern United States in 1989. This hurricane caused $12 billion worth of damage.
Mr Declan Murphy, director of Met Eireann, welcomed the visiting meteorologists.