Hurricane Dorian

As a hurricane intensifies, hurricane hunters are in the sky doing something almost unimaginable: flying through the center of the storm. With each pass, the scientists aboard these planes take measurements that satellites can’t and send them to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center. Jason Dunion, a University of Miami meteorologist, has led hurricane field programs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He described the technology the team uses to gauge hurricane behavior in real time and the experience aboard a P-3 Orion as it plunges through the eyewall of a hurricane. What happens aboard a hurricane hunter when you fly into a storm? Basically, we’re take a flying laboratory into the heart of the hurricane, all the way up to Category 5s. While we’re flying, we’re crunching data and sending it to forecasters and climate modelers. In the P-3s, we routinely cut through the middle of the storm, right into the eye. Picture an X p...