What Does Rain Smell Like? by Simon King

Author:Simon King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHY WOULD YOU FLY INTO A HURRICANE?

Accurately forecasting tropical storms and hurricanes is vitally important for knowing where they are going to impact. Without taking proper action, a hurricane can cause widespread destruction, injury and death. It is also important economically to know when and where a hurricane might hit as damage can cost the government and insurance companies billions of dollars. While we’ll cover the monitoring and forecasting of hurricanes in this chapter, the process is very similar for typhoons and cyclones.

Before we construct a weather forecast, an accurate picture of the state of the atmosphere is crucial. There are many methods to record weather observations around the world, from the surface and sky. Since the introduction of satellites in the 1980s, we’ve gained a far more detailed representation of the atmosphere, as this technology can monitor conditions over the oceans and remote regions of land, places where we can’t physically get to on the ground.

Before the introduction of satellites, we had a good network of weather observations from the land but only very limited ones at sea via ships and ocean buoys. The problem with this was that hurricanes form and develop over the ocean, the one place where we simply couldn’t measure conditions properly. It was in 1943 when the first manned reconnaissance flight flew into a Category 1 hurricane that threatened Galveston, Texas. The US now have a dedicated team of ‘hurricane hunters’ who fly out into the Atlantic or eastern Pacific and take meteorological measurements of developing storms and hurricanes.

In the early days, the hurricane hunters would be tasked with flying into storms with an array of onboard instruments that measured wind and atmospheric pressure in all parts of the storm. It was these measurements that would a) determine the intensity of the storm and b) provide data that would go into the forecast computer models to give a projection of its track and development. It is one thing flying into a developing tropical storm that might have wind speeds of 64mph or so around its centre, but these hurricane hunters would also need to fly into the eyes of major hurricanes that had sustained wind speeds of over 157mph, with gusts much higher than that.

You may think that these people are crazy, I mean, why would you want to fly into the most destructive weather system on Earth? Well, those who do it are very humble and pragmatic about it. The key thing for them is to avoid the severe turbulence in the storm – the up and down winds that might give you a bumpy ride at times on a commercial flight. In a hurricane, it’s these up and down winds that could potentially break the wings off an airplane. The pilots can track where the severe turbulence is located using onboard instruments and navigate around it. While they will then be flying in wind speeds and gusts in excess of 160mph in the strongest hurricanes, these are straight line winds and something even commercial aircraft are used to handling.

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