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For the 2004 hurricane season, Flaherty says NOAA flew over 65 missions into hurricanes; a total of 475 flight hours and over 100,000 nautical miles traveled. He says the worst storm of 2004, from his perspective, was Ivan the Terrible, a “Cat 5” which barreled across Grenada, grazed the western tip of Cuba, and, eventually roared ashore in Alabama.
“Ivan was bad. We were up at 45,000 feet and getting our butts kicked,” Flaherty says.
But he wasn’t in Kermit or Miss Piggy, Flaherty was aboard NOAA’s Gulfstream IV-SP surveillance jet, otherwise known as Gonzo, a relatively new member of the Muppet fleet who joined the family less than 10 years ago. Like the others, Gonzo has his own Muppet portrait painted near the main hatch, exclusively created for NOAA by the Jim Henson Company.
Each plane has its own limitations, and data-gathering tasks are assigned accordingly. This is especially important for hurricane research when it comes to releasing GPS “dropwindsondes” into a storm.
These cylindrical-shaped expendable instruments come equipped with parachutes, and they are dropped from the belly of both the jet and the turboprop P-3’s into the storm. Information regarding air temperature, dewpoint, atmospheric pressure, and horizontal and vertical winds is relayed to the plane every two seconds.
The sondes stop transmitting as soon as they hit the water and are usually lost. Each dropwindsonde costs about $600, and NOAA used about 1,200 during the 2004 hurricane season, which equals $720,000 spent. It seems like a lot, but Flaherty puts things into perspective.
“Every linear mile that has to be evacuated – due to a hurricane – costs about a million dollars, so $600 a sonde is actually saving millions of dollars.”
He elaborates his point by comparing the situation to what would have happened 20 years ago if a hurricane was brewing off the east coast of the United States. A massive area would be put under hurricane watch, and thousands of people might be needlessly evacuated if the threat was later downgraded.
Landsea agrees, and says that the advent of dropwindsondes have been nothing short of revolutionary. Without them, he says, we wouldn’t have the 5-day weather forecast, which the National Hurricane Center began doing two years ago.
“They’ve (dropwindsondes) taught us a lot about what the winds are like from the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere,” Landsea says.
Warren Von Werne, a reconnaissance coordinator at the National Hurricane Center’s Tropical Prediction Center, who worked for 22 days straight during the onslaught of 2004: “The jet – such as Gonzo – flies out ahead of the storm, samples the environment, and may drop as many as 30 sondes, in order to create models,” he says. The models, he explains, consist of dynamical and numerical numbers the National Weather Service has developed in order to generate weather forecasts.
Von Werne says the P-3 aircrafts, like Kermit and Miss Piggy, are mainly used for conducting hurricane research. They are frequently outfitted with new instrumentation for trial runs. If the new equipment is successful, it graduates to the Air Force and the WC-130 aircraft, which is what Von Werne usually deals with.
The WC-130 aircraft is a modified version of the Lockheed-Martin C-130 transport plane, and carries a crew of six. It travels at a height of about 10,000 feet and are used to gather critical information about the hurricane’s eye. The main goal of these particular planes is to attain the “vortex message,” which is accomplished by releasing a dropwindsonde into the exact center of the storm. This crucial drop determines the absolute lowest pressure, the wind field, and the exact location of the hurricane’s eye.
So what’s it like in there, within the eye of a hurricane?