Good Evening…

There are many ways to measure the weather within and around a hurricane, but the most direct way is to fly an airplane right thru the eye!  Now that’s a bumpy flight.  The special aircraft is called the WP-3 Orion Hurricane Hunter. It essentially is a weather laboratory in the sky..

The picture below is from inside the eye of massive Hurricane Katrina.  Once inside the eye, the  plane is surrounded by a 360 degree circular wall of clouds(called the eye wall) which extends from just above the ocean to 40, 000 ft up into the sky. (see cockpit picture below)

The plane will make multiple passes thru  all levels of the storm recording 100′s of pieces of data.  This data is sent back to NOAA’s super computer models, which in turn, help determine future strength and track of storm.  For example this is the latest forecast track for Isaac…

Ofcourse Doppler radar, satellites, other research aircraft along with high resolution computer models all come together to help better predict these storms…..Tony Petrarca