Recent observing system experiments (Uhlhorn and Nolan, 2012)
suggest that current technology (e. g. SFMR) sampling of a
numerical model "nature run" hurricane could miss
(underestimate) small convective scale wind maxima by an average
of 7%. However such models are very sensitive to
parameterizations and tuning coefficients, and are not capable
of simulating atmospheric turbulence (Rotunno and Bryan 2012,
Bryan 2012, Rotunno et al., 2009) so they are missing details
seen in real hurricanes. In real storms such wind maxima would
likely be sampled by Doppler radars aboard NOAA's P3 research
aircraft, so undersampling should not be an issue if NOAA
aircraft are monitoring the storm. Alternatively, if the
reconnaissance aircraft is not equipped with Doppler radar and
the SFMR manages to sample a small scale convective feature, the
associated wind maximum could be interpreted as a transient
feature unrepresentative of storm intensity (Brennan et al.,
2009, Powell et al., 2011). Uhlhorn and Nolan's work showed tha