![]() But, during that flight, we might start to see the structure change pretty quickly.Īir in, up and out – the breathing – is a great way to diagnose a storm. A lot of times the storm looks healthy on satellite, but we’ll get in with the radar and the structure is sloppy or the eye may be filled with clouds, which tells us the storm isn’t quite ready to rapidly intensify. Is that really moist air rushing in toward the center of the storm? If the boundary layer is deep, the storm can also take a bigger inhale.Ĭross-section of a hurricane. So we might watch our dropsonde or tail doppler radar data for how the winds are flowing at the boundary layer. That’s why we get those huge updrafts in the eyewall. Hurricanes breathe: They draw air in at low levels, the air rushes up at the eyewall, and then it vents out at the top of the storm and away from the center. We also look at the boundary layer, the area just above the ocean. That’s a sign that it could rapidly intensify. But a few hours later, we might fly back into the storm and notice that the two centers are more lined up. So, one thing we look for is alignment.Ī storm that isn’t yet fully together might have low-level circulation, a few kilometers above the ocean, that isn’t lined up with its mid-level circulation 6 or 7 kilometers up. Hurricanes like to stand up straight – think of a spinning top. What does a storm look like when it’s rapidly intensifying? Satellites can offer forecasters a basic view, but we need to get our hurricane hunters into the storm itself to really pick the hurricane apart. We might start to see the ingredients quickly coming together: Is the ocean warm to a great depth? Is the atmosphere nice and juicy, with a lot of moisture around the storm? Are the winds favorable? We also look at the inner core: What does the structure of the storm look like, and is it starting to consolidate? So far, rapid intensification is hard to predict. It’s a lot like a rollercoaster ride, only you don’t know exactly when the next up or down is coming.Ī hurricane hunter flies through Hurricane Ida in 2021. You can lose a few hundred feet in a couple of seconds if you have a down draft, or you can hit an updraft and gain a few hundred feet in a matter of seconds. When we were coming through the eyewall of Dorian, it was all seat belts. It felt like being a feather in the wind. ![]() The storm was near the Bahamas and rapidly intensifying to a very strong Category 5 storm, with winds around 185 mph. ![]() My most intense flight was Dorian in 2019. Can you describe what scientists are experiencing on these flights? We want to cut through the roughest part of the storm because we’re trying to measure the strongest winds for the Hurricane Center. We’re typically flying at an altitude of around 10,000 feet, about a quarter of the way between the ocean surface and the top of the storm. The eye is the calmest part of the storm, but it’s surrounded by the most intense part: the eyewall. These might be developing storms, or they might be Category 5s. Picture an X pattern – we keep cutting through the storm multiple times during a mission. In the P-3s, we routinely cut through the middle of the storm, right into the eye. While we’re flying, we’re crunching data and sending it to forecasters and climate modelers. What happens aboard a hurricane hunter when you fly into a storm?īasically, we’re take a flying laboratory into the heart of the hurricane, all the way up to Category 5s. He described the technology the team is using to gauge hurricane behavior in real time and the experience aboard a P-3 Orion as it plunges through the eyewall of a hurricane. Jason Dunion, a University of Miami meteorologist, leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2022 hurricane field program. With each pass, the scientists aboard these planes take measurements that satellites can’t and send them to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center. As Hurricane Ian intensified on its way toward the Florida coast, hurricane hunters were in the sky doing something almost unimaginable: flying through the center of the storm. ![]()
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