HOUSTON — Members of the Air Force 53rd Weather Reconnaissance and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA are known as the "Hurricane Hunters" — flying into danger to get the first look at the harshest storms.
“Every storm is different," said Maj. Alex Boykin, an Air Force pilot flying a C-130 Hurricane Hunter. "So that’s a different conversation with each storm, but it’s a pretty interesting ride.”
This is the first time in years crews have visited so close to Central Texas. The 25 Weather team drove out to Ellington Field in Houston for a peek inside.
Members of the public were also invited out as well and had a chance to speak with the men and women braving the harshest storms to get there first.
“The thing I love about this plane is that it’s a crew airplane," said Capt. Kyle McElhaney, an Air Force navigator on the Hurricane Hunter crew. "There’s a pilot, copilot, navigator, weather officer and load officer and we all have to work efficiently to do our jobs.”
“We just tend to find the severe a lot of the time," Boykin said. "So there will be several time when the floor will just drop out. And you come just crashing down into it. And there’s other storms that are pretty nice to you.”
You never know what you’ll get close to a powerful storm, but once crews are there the work has to begin.
NOAA and Air Force teams deploy devices called dropwindsondes to determine position by GPS and use senors to measure the intensity of any given storm.
"We’ll drop sondes all throughout the storm. Even in the eyewall, we call that the radius of max winds," said Nick Underwood, a programs engineer with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters. "We’ll also drop one in the center. That’s where the real hunting takes place. That’s where we have to find what our flight level winds are going to zero.”
Once they have the fix on the storm, that information is disseminated to provide better forecasts.
The Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1. And while Central Texas may not get the major impacts like they do in Houston and Galveston with storm surge and very intense eyewall winds, we can be impacted by tropical systems including flooding, tornadoes and every once in a while if they’re strong enough we can get tropical storm or even hurricane force winds.
That’s why the Hurricane Hunters are vital to bringing us information as we track storms this tropical season.
