Hunting hurricanes in a plane. More risky than hunting eclipses; slightly less risky than hunting tornadoes. Or maybe it's a tossup. Daring? Fool hardy? An excuse to do cool dangerous flying under the excuse of scientific research? Don't worry; I won't give the game away. ;-)
This Yahoo News slideshow gives a preview of the Weather Channel's upcoming series, The Hurricane Hunters:
Hurricane Hunters' debuts on The Weather Channel
Published: Monday, June 11, 2012, 3:55 AM
Pardon Christian D'Andrea if he must suppress a smile when he’s on a commercial airliner experiencing turbulence. As creator, director and executive producer of the new Weather Channel series “Hurricane Hunters,” he’s flown through much worse. The new documentary series, which debuts with back-to-back episodes at 8 p.m. Monday (June 11), flies into and out of hurricanes with the Biloxi, Miss.-based 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron.
There’s a gigantic ‘Wow’ factor to it that hits you right between the eyes,” D’Andrea said during a recent phone interview. “It’s 2012. We’re a very sophisticated civilization, technologically speaking. We have satellites beaming information 24 hours a day. And yet in 2012 we have to send human beings in airplanes into the eyes of hurricanes, one of the most dangerous places imaginable. Not above the hurricane but actually through it and into the eye itself.
“When you're boarding that plane for the first time to go into your first hurricane and you know where that plane is about to go, it's a bizarre feeling. But I will say one thing. You're not afraid when you're on the plane, because the crew, the guys and gals who fly those planes, are so professional. They’re so cool, it's infectious. And you become as calm as you can be given what you’re about to go do.”
Sounds like the trip of a lifetime.
A hurricane is a tropical cyclone in the in the Atlantic and North East Pacific, or so Wikipedia claims. Supposedly every other tropical cyclone is a typhoon, though a list of Atlantic and Pacific storms indicate no real consistency.
And it's beside the point if you get caught in one. Tropical cyclones actually sound like the Borg of Tornados, a collection of cyclone like thunderstorms rotating in one massive cyclone, and you--and your property-- will be assimilated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
A tropical cyclone is a storm system characterized by a low-pressure center and numerous thunderstorms that produce strong winds and heavy rain. Tropical cyclones strengthen when water evaporated from the ocean is released as the saturated air rises, resulting in condensation of water vapor contained in the moist air. They are fueled by a different heat mechanism than other cyclonic windstorms such as nor'easters, European windstorms, and polar lows. The characteristic that separates tropical cyclones from other cyclonic systems is that at any height in the atmosphere, the center of a tropical cyclone will be warmer than its surroundings; a phenomenon called "warm core" storm systems.
The term "tropical" refers both to the geographical origin of these systems, which usually form in tropical regions of the globe, and to their formation in maritime tropical air masses. The term "cyclone" refers to such storms' cyclonic nature, with counterclockwise wind flow in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise wind flow in the Southern Hemisphere. The opposite direction of the wind flow is a result of the Coriolis force. Depending on its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is referred to by names such as hurricane (/ˈhʌrɨkeɪn/, /ˈhʌrɨkən/), typhoon, tropical storm, cyclonic storm, tropical depression, and simply cyclone.
It's doubtful anyone will be having this conversation as the house flies by:
Himself: Ah fuck, it's a bleeding typhoon!
Herself: Actually, dear, technically it's a hurricane...there goes the cat...
Cat: Mrreeeeeeoooooow!
But you never know.
The damage these storms can leave is no joke; attempts to disperse them via Better Living through Chemistry---some reasonable, other less so-- have all failed:
Artificial dissipation
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States government attempted to weaken hurricanes through Project Stormfury by seeding selected storms with silver iodide. It was thought that the seeding would cause supercooled water in the outer rainbands to freeze, causing the inner eyewall to collapse and thus reducing the winds.[71] The winds of Hurricane Debbie—a hurricane seeded in Project Stormfury—dropped as much as 31%, but Debbie regained its strength after each of two seeding forays.[72] In an earlier episode in 1947, disaster struck when a hurricane east of Jacksonville, Florida promptly changed its course after being seeded, and smashed into Savannah, Georgia.[73] Because there was so much uncertainty about the behavior of these storms, the federal government would not approve seeding operations unless the hurricane had a less than 10% chance of making landfall within 48 hours, greatly reducing the number of possible test storms. The project was dropped after it was discovered that eyewall replacement cycles occur naturally in strong hurricanes, casting doubt on the result of the earlier attempts. Today, it is known that silver iodide seeding is not likely to have an effect because the amount of supercooled water in the rainbands of a tropical cyclone is too low.[74]
Other approaches have been suggested over time, including cooling the water under a tropical cyclone by towing icebergs into the tropical oceans.[75] Other ideas range from covering the ocean in a substance that inhibits evaporation,[76] dropping large quantities of ice into the eye at very early stages of development (so that the latent heat is absorbed by the ice, instead of being converted to kinetic energy that would feed the positive feedback loop),[75] or blasting the cyclone apart with nuclear weapons.[18] Project Cirrus even involved throwing dry ice on a cyclone.[77] These approaches all suffer from one flaw above many others: tropical cyclones are simply too large and short-lived for any of the weakening techniques to be practical.[78]
Maybe the Hurricane Hunter research will reveal more than the obvious; the best way to weather a hurricane is to not be caught in one.
Unless you're hunting one in a plane. I wonder, do they charter tours? Where do I sign up?
And because Yahoo news is notorious for disappearing down the memory hole, these images have been swiped for posterity. Enjoy.
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