Drone, Sensors May Open Path Into Eye of Storm

"It's better to be small," he said. "The scales of turbulence are pretty large relative to the craft, so they kind of sneak between these big eddies, if you will. They also right themselves very quickly. These things are pretty robust. They'll get tossed around a little bit, but then they'll right themselves."

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Its size also makes the drone quite economical on fuel. Cione compared the 24-cc. fuel-injected motor to that of "a fancy lawnmower," and noted that in the 10-hour Ophelia flight the craft burned less than two gallons of gasoline.

Other forecasters are working to learn more about hurricanes with land-based instruments.

Kirt Squires, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, co-wrote the new study of the relationship between lightning frequency near the eye of a hurricane and a storm's intensity. Squires and a colleague at the University of Hawaii, where Squires recently completed his master's degree, analyzed data on intensity and lightning strike rates from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the disastrous storms of 2005.

They combined data from the remote sensor network with readings from NOAA's hurricane hunter aircraft and a NASA weather satellite. The ground-based sensors, about the height of a person and topped by a white bulb, can detect electromagnetic signals produced by cloud-to-ground lightning strikes from thousands of miles away.

Researchers found that outbreaks of greater lightning activity were associated with periods when Katrina and Rita were gathering strength. They think that the conditions that fuel a hurricane's intensity -- the energy transfer that occurs when water condenses from vapor into droplets, releasing heat and causing updrafts of air -- also give rise to more lightning strikes in the heart of the storm.

"It's not that the lightning itself is intensifying the storm," Squires said. "It's the fact that if the updrafts and the eye walls are getting stronger and the hurricane is getting stronger, then we should see an increase in the amount of lightning. . . . Both storms contained their highest lightning outbreaks during their rapid intensification period."

Forecasters are not using lightning data in their intensity predictions yet, but Squires says that they might if further study bears out the relationship.

"No matter how good this ever gets, no one would ever just solely go on lightning strikes to forecast a hurricane," he said. "But it's another tool."