JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Howling, hurricane force winds and blinding rain -- when a storm bears down on our area we immediately begin the process of protecting our property and evacuating flood zones.
But while we are taking steps to protect our homes by boarding them up, a flight team is suiting up and preparing to fly into the eye of that storm, all to provide us with a more accurate hurricane forecast.
Recommended Videos
Maj. Tobi Baker, ARWO, explained what they hope to get out of each flight into the storm, "The basic things we are looking for are speed, direction, and intensity of the storm. The way we do that is we'll go through the storm multiple times, one of the things I'm looking for is actually the center point of the storm. We'll go the the storm multiple times, like I said, we find that center point each time. If you can
connect those, it's like connect the dots and it gives you the speed and direction of the storm.
"At the same time we're dropping instruments usually at the eyewall and center of the storm and other places of interest. The ones in the center we are actually getting the intensity of the storm or the pressure itself - that gives us whether its getting stronger or weaker."
Maj. Baker estimated that the real-time data they collect on each mission increases the accuracy of each hurricane forecast by between 20 to 40 percent.
According to the Hurricane Hunter website, scientists aboard the aircraft deploy GPS instruments as the aircraft flies through the hurricane. These instruments continuously transmit measurements of pressure, humidity, temperature, and wind direction and speed as they fall toward the sea, providing a detailed look at the structure of the storm and its intensity. The tail Doppler radar and lower fuselage radar systems scan the storm vertically and horizontally, giving scientists and forecasters a real-time look at the storm. They can also deploy probes called bathythermographs that measure the temperature of the sea.
Cmdr. Nathan Kahn, a lead pilot, said there can be scary moments when flying through a powerful storm.
"When flying through Hurricane Matthew in 2016, it was the single worst pass that we had into any hurricane that year. Our track took us just a little too close to one of the big areas of convection in the eyewall of that storm and at one point the aircraft was climbing and I was pushing the nose down and the aircraft continued to climb, it was kind of like being in an elevator on an airplane -- not ideal," he said.
"Then a few seconds later the airplane was descending and I was pulling the nose up and the airplane was still descending. We kind of went back and forth like that for a little while, I call it wrestling an alligator. We managed to keep the aircraft right side up and we got ourselves into the eyewall," Kahn said.
"The way you know something is really scary on this airplane is silence," he added. "Because we talk all of the time, there is a lot of coordination, a lot of conversation, a lot of just general chatter on our intercom system. We broke out into the eye of that storm, and the clouds kind of parted and the light came back into the airplane and everybody was dead silent for about ten seconds. Then there was one big sigh of relief and we all got back to work."
You can watch video of the flight here:
Slicing through the eyewall of a hurricane, buffeted by howling winds, blinding rain and violent updrafts and downdrafts before entering the relative calm of the storm’s eye, NOAA’s two Lockheed WP-3D Orion four-engine turboprop aircraft, affectionately nicknamed "Kermit" (N42RF) and "Miss Piggy" (N43RF), probe every wind and pressure change, repeating the often grueling experience again and again during the course of an 8-10 hour mission, according to their website
Storm surge forecasts have benefited from the addition of NOAA-developed Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometers (SFMRs) to NOAA’s P-3s. SFMRs measure over-ocean wind speed and rain rate in hurricanes and tropical storms, key indicators of potentially deadly storm surges. Surge is a major cause of hurricane-related deaths.
Scary incidents aside, Kahn said he loves his job and plans to continue to fly into hurricanes, but he has one request. He hopes that people take hurricanes seriously and prepare for this season.