Hurricane Hunters

The 2004 hurricane season was a whopper. Nine named storms hit the United States during the six-month season-six hurricanes (Alex, Charley, Frances, Gaston, Ivan and Jeanne) and three tropical storms (Bonnie, Hermine and Matthew). Hurricanes Charley, Ivan and Jeanne blew on shore as major storms. As government weather-watchers anticipate the 2005 season, which begins June 1, they still are reeling.

If this year is anything like last, when a hurricane makes landfall, the weather geeks will get their kicks staying up half the night watching TV correspondents getting soaked to their bones and knocked on their butts as they go live in lashing rain and 125-mph gusts.

Marty Mayeaux, a government meteorologist, spent his birthday chasing down Jeanne and Ivan last September. Just before midnight on a Wednesday night, he was in Savannah, Ga., 360 miles from home, holed up in a Fairfield Inn with 10 male co-workers and whatever pizza, snacks and beer they could rustle up from the few nearby establishments open that late. In the breakfast room just off the hotel lobby, the TV was flitting from the Weather Channel to ABC to CNN to NBC to CBS to Fox. Closed french doors weren't containing the boisterous voices. Laughter poured out into a first-floor hallway while the night clerk was pacing.

Mayeaux's wife, infant and a cake with 28 candles on it were waiting at home near Tampa, Fla. His thoughts kept hitchhiking back to them. "This job can be really tough on your family, and I try to put my family first. Sometimes it's hard," he said. It had been especially hard since the middle of August.

Sept. 15, 2004, was the statistical peak of hurricane season. Seven of the named Atlantic Basin storms had spun up in August alone and a total of eight since the first of June. The season had more than two months left to go.

Mayeaux and his buddies started working without a significant break a month earlier. Some of them hadn't made it home since then for more than two or three days at a stretch. They could boast they'd been to all the vacation hot spots-the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cancun, Caracas, St. Croix. But they hadn't seen much of them, except through clouds from 45,000 feet. They earn their living chasing storms for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They are the Hurricane Hunters, an elite group of aviators who dare to fly where others fear.

Most air crews go out of their way to avoid bad weather. Not the Hurricane Hunters. This mix of civilians and uniformed officers-men and women, all educated in meteorology-heads straight for some of the most vicious storms on Earth, taking wing in a fleet of seemingly indestructible airplanes. They soar above, around and even inside hurricanes, gathering wind temperature and pressure data to feed the computer models that forecasters use to predict the storms' intensity and paths.

Since the mid-1970s, they've used two low and slow Lockheed WP-3D Orion turboprops to gauge hurricane intensity and landfall position. The mission of the P-3s is to poke through the eye wall of a hurricane at altitudes of 1,500 feet to 10,000 feet. They probe every wind and pressure change with instruments called dropsondes that are shot with a clack-whoosh out of a tube in the tail of the plane every 90 miles or so along the way.

The hurricanes poke back, of course. Howling winds, blinding rain, bulletlike hail and violent updrafts and downdrafts make the P-3s seem more like airborne roller coasters. Pushing into a hurricane is a grueling experience that's repeated several times during the course of a 10-hour mission.

Here's a piece of trivia: The P-3s are called Miss Piggy and Kermit. In the 1980s, an aircraft mechanic tried to pretty up one of the ugly airplanes known as "The Pig" with nose art of the Muppet diva wearing a flight suit and goggles. Jim Henson Productions got wind of it, designed a logo for NOAA, and the rest is history.

Kermit bears a scar from a dust-up with Hurricane Hugo near Barbados on Sept. 15, 1989. The P-3 was penetrating Hugo's eye wall at 1,500 feet when the storm suddenly strengthened to a Category 5, with sustained winds greater than 156 mph. Alternating updrafts and downdrafts caught the plane and spun it around. One of the P-3's four engines spit fire, and the plane fell toward the sea. Everything inside that wasn't tied down, including the 16 crewmembers, was momentarily weightless. A 200-pound life raft tore loose and dented an inch-thick steel handrail that runs the length of the cabin ceiling.

The P-3 pulled out of a rolling dive at 700 feet, just in time to be led to safety by an Air Force Reserve C-130 that was flying the storm for NOAA. A couple of hunters quit the corps after that. Having heard the story, some who came along afterward won't fly the P-3. They insist on a tamer ride aboard the high and fast Gulfstream IV-SP turbofan jet that joined the fleet beginning with the 1997 season.

The G-IV, Gonzo, is known as "the gentleman's hurricane hunter." It has flown around every Atlantic hurricane that has posed a threat to the United States in the past eight years. In 10 hours, it covers thousands of square miles around and above a hurricane, using dropsondes to map upper-atmosphere steering currents that influence the storm's movement. The G-IV usually stays 100 to 300 miles away from the eye. A ride aboard it through the outer bands can be smoother than some fair-weather trips on a commercial airliner. But just in case, the barf bags are in the head.

The data it gathers makes landfall forecasts more accurate by 20 percent. "Before we had the G-IV, if they could see a hurricane was coming to the coast, they might have to evacuate a 50-mile stretch. Now they might only have to remove people from 30 miles," says one of the pilots, Cmdr. Rob Poston. He heard somewhere that every mile of coastline you have to evacuate for a hurricane costs the local government about a million dollars. The number is quoted widely.

According to NOAA, the improved forecasts "saved untold lives" during Florida's hurricane season from hell. The agency says its five-day hurricane forecasts are as good now as its three-day forecasts were 10 years ago, and that its Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Frances forecasts were even better than that.

Those two storms drew a big X over the state. Charley blew through Florida Aug. 14, entering on the southwest coast as a Category 4 storm, with sustained winds near 150 mph, and exiting near Daytona Beach on the northeast coast as a much weaker Category 1. Frances was a Category 2, with sustained winds between 96 and 110 mph, when it crossed the southeast coast at Hutchinson Island on Sept. 5. It left the state near New Port Richey on the northwest coast as a tropical storm on Sept. 6. Charley and Frances left 84 people dead and $26 billion worth of damage in the Caribbean and the eastern United States. Sixty-six victims lived in Florida.

Dealing with the reality of their own lives in a hurricane zone makes the hunters' job even tougher. Their home base is on Florida's west coast-the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Last season was Poston's fourth as a Hurricane Hunter and his busiest by far. He used to tell his neighbors, "I wish we'd get some hurricanes this season." His respect for the storms is fresh. "They're not going to hear me say that anymore," he promises.

With Frances gone just nine days, the Hurricane Hunters were flying two more storms aiming for Florida. Jeanne was a two-day-old tropical storm over Puerto Rico, but quickly achieving hurricane status. Ivan was a two-week-old Category 3 hurricane stirring up trouble in the Gulf of Mexico. Before the end of September, these two storms would double the property losses and claim an estimated 3,200 lives in the Caribbean and 20 in Florida.

While the Hurricane Hunters were up in the clouds, their neighbors hunkered behind plywood and sandbags. Ivan had its 50-mile-wide eye on Gulf Shores, Ala., near Pensacola, Fla., far north of Tampa. It would hit there overnight. But the Tampa Bay area-still mopping, shoveling and chain-sawing its way out of messes made by Charley and Frances-was suffering from the windup ahead of Ivan's 121-mph punch. There would be more wind-blown debris and more standing water.

Everything seemed so peaceful up in the air. Most of the time, the sky was milk. Once in a while, when the G-IV hit a patch of relatively dry air, the sky turned to popcorn on blue velvet. It reminded Poston's co-pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Hagan, of a P-3 ride he took through Hurricane Edouard in 1998. "It's really something when you break out [into the eye] and see how calm it is and how beautiful it is inside," Hagan says. "If you have one that's perfect like that-where you're just 360 wrapped around with white clouds, the sun's above-you can see the surface. And you can't capture it on film."

The G-IV flew mostly on auto-pilot out of MacDill, on a pre-charted 2,000-mile course shaped something like a horn of plenty. It went north toward Pensacola, looped south around the trailing edges of Ivan, and then headed west to just offshore Houston. From there, the jet curved south and east across the gulf. It passed north of the Yucatan Peninsula into the Florida Straits, brushing Key West and the northern shore of Cuba on its way to the Bahamas and the edges of Jeanne. The crew deployed 26 dropsondes in eight hours.

Mayeaux, the flight director, timed and called the drops from a radar workstation just aft of the cockpit. "AVAPS [Airborne Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System], stand by. Three, two, one, drop." Clack-whoosh! At the very back of the plane, Lt. Cmdr. Will Odell, a pilot in training, let fly a dropsonde. The $600 device is a cardboard cy-linder about the size of a champagne bottle, packed with meteorological instruments, a Global Positioning System signal relay and a parachute. As each one descended, it transmitted weather data back to computers on the airplane.

The computers chewed on the details and spit them out in graphs-the beauty and ferocity of nature depicted as a function of altitude, temperature and humidity. To an untrained eye, the charts look like a preschooler got rowdy with crayons. Research meteorologist Chris Landsea read the scribbles and dialed the National Hurricane Center on the satellite phone.

"We're noticing a tendency [for Ivan] to turn maybe a little bit to the east and north, but we're not sure yet," Landsea said into his headset microphone.

On the Miami end of the line, a man sighed. "I don't want any drastic shift here," the man said. "It's like, everybody's panicking."

Offline, Mayeaux said he'd hate to be the hurricane specialist in charge of bringing Ivan inland. "You can hear it in his voice," he said. "He's nervous about this."

Strong crosswinds at MacDill kept the Hurricane Hunters from returning safely to Tampa, so they put down in a light breeze at the G-IV's service center at Savannah/ Hilton Head International Airport in Georgia. The jet needed a tire change and some engine maintenance anyway. They rented two minivans and checked into the hotel to rest up before starting the eight-hour drive home at sunup.

Over his continental breakfast Thursday morning and again between naps on the road trip, Odell checked his laptop computer for e-mail. He was awaiting any word at all from the southern Windward Islands, but most eagerly pictures of his 45-foot ketch, Kuma. The sailboat had been his floating home in Annapolis, Md., until earlier in the year. He left it on the island of Grenada before he transferred to Tampa.

His insurance company told him that if he wanted to keep the boat covered against hurricanes, he would have to park it somewhere south of 20 degrees, 40 minutes north latitude because hurricanes don't hit so close to the equator. Odell planned on getting Kuma down there, having it safe, going to Tampa, finding a place to live, switching insurance companies, and then getting a block of vacation in the spring to go sail the boat home.

As luck would have it, he picked a marina in Ivan's path. "The eye went right over Grenada" on Sept. 7, Odell says. From pictures, he saw Kuma weathered the storm fairly well. But Ivan killed 39 islanders and left 60,000 homeless on Grenada alone. The National Weather Service says it was the southernmost major hurricane on record.

That fact, along with the astronomical damage estimates, helped make 2004 an unprecedented tropical weather year. NOAA aircraft logged more than 475 flight hours, covered more than 100,000 nautical miles of hurricane lines, and deployed more than 1,200 dropsondes. They used up more than half the year's hurricane surveillance budget of 250 flight hours just on Ivan. Several pilots overran their flight-hour limits tracking the four Florida storms and had to get extensions.

June 1 marked the start of this year's hurricane season, Odell's first as a G-IV pilot. He's looking forward to the next six months with excitement and maybe just a little apprehension. "We've heard it might be another busy year," he says.