A team of hurricane hunters — the aviators known for flying into the eye of Atlantic hurricanes — plan to fly over the Gulf Coast this afternoon to gather reconnaissance ahead of the giant winter storm.
Engineers on board will drop sensors across the Gulf, which will pick up on atmospheric conditions, such as wind speed and direction, air temperature and humidity.
The data they gather will be fed into a model to help predict which areas will get pummeled with heavy snow or ice, and when.
Outside of hurricane season, it’s not uncommon for hurricane hunters to fly into winter storms. Since 2018, they have studied atmospheric rivers over the Pacific Ocean — long belts of moisture in the atmosphere, akin to rivers in the sky, that release rain, snow or ice.
“They’re all over the planet,” said Jonathan Zawislak, the flight director. “The reality is that we have to get out into them sooner in order to forecast better.”
Thursday’s flight is part of the Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program — a collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. As part of an expansion to the program starting this month, it will conduct flights over the Atlantic Ocean to improve forecasts of extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere.
The team of engineers and meteorologists plans to depart from Lakeland, Florida, at 3 p.m. and climb to up to 45,000 feet.
“Forecasts love data, and pretty much every time we go take that aircraft airborne, we’re going to improve the forecast,” Zawislak said. “That’s really our goal.”
Zawislak said the team plans to conduct more flights this weekend, in potentially choppier conditions. As always, he said, the hurricane hunters balance their mission to collect data with the imperative to avoid the most dangerous weather.
“It’s a pretty remarkable effort required to forecast a winter storm like this one correctly,” he said.