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The Air Force Reserve Command's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at Keesler AFB, Mississippi, spent a busy late summer and early fall battling Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne, hurricanes that pounded Florida and the Southeastern United States. The Hurricane Hunters, as the 53rd WRS is known, fly WC-130Hs through the center of hurricanes, parachuting dropsondes (small instrumented tubes) to collect weather data between 10,000 feet and land and then transmitting the collected data via satellite to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The data is used to improve the accuracy of predicting hurricane patterns.
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