Hurricanes: Inside the Storm

Reported May 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Warnings say stay away, but why are airplanes flying toward hurricanes? Preparations are underway for the 2006 hurricane season. Researchers say we're in the middle of a rough cycle, meaning we could be in store for more strong storms this season.

As the wind and rain hit, most people are high-tailing it away from the hurricane. Most ... But not all!

"It's like an E-Ticket ride at Disney World. I mean, you are just all over the sky," aircraft operater Jim McFadden, Ph.D., tells Ivanhoe. "Sometimes you start to do a lot of thinking about your life, because it might come to an end."

McFadden flies straight into these massive storms. This Chief of Programs & Projects Staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Aircraft Operations Center in Tampa, Fla., says, "It's like being inside of a huge football stadium, because you have the entire wall cloud around you, spreading out toward the top, beautiful blue sky."

But getting to the eye is a rough ride.

"We had severe turbulence," McFadden says. "Everything was rearranged on the airplane. I mean, you know, locked draws were ripped out."

Chris Landsea, Ph.D., Science and Operations Officer at NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla., says it's only when you're in the rain bands and in the eye wall that it gets real turbulent.

"But if you get into the eye of the hurricane and it's a strong hurricane, then visually it's amazing," Landsea says. "Then you look down, and you may have 30-foot waves, 50-foot waves hitting each other."

NOAA has two large planes that work with the United States Air Force to help the Hurricane Center gather information about the hurricanes. Meteorologists and atmospheric scientists like McFadden and Landsea fly into each and every hurricane to make sure they know exactly what will happen to our coast.

"People wouldn't know what's going on with the storm unless we were," McFadden says. "We're in there finding where the center of the storm is, what the lowest pressure is, estimating surface pressure in the center of the storm, and transmitting all that information back."

A new device, dropwindsondes are lowered from the plane and can measure air temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed at the ocean's surface. NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center supplies the information to the National Hurricane Center, which uses the information gathered during the flights to track the storm and issue warnings.

Landsea flew into Katrina the morning she hit land. "When we saw sunrise come up and we could actually see some of the storm surge coming ashore, we realized that there was going to be a lot of problems."

Katrina left behind destruction worse than any other weather event in history, and researchers at NOAA believe they were able to save tens of thousands of lives by pinpointing -- within a mile -- where the eye would hit.

"We concentrate so much on making sure that the information we're sending out is accurate," McFadden says, because what they see in the air is what people will be dealing with on land.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

National Hurricane Center
11691 S.W. 17th Street
Miami, FL 33165-2149
(305) 229-4404
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

For more information on weather phenomena and meteorology:

The American Meteorological Society
45 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

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