Seeking to Solve Storm's Riddle
NOAA's 20-Scientist Flying Weather Station Pierces Hurricane
By Catharine Skipp
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, September 7 1996; Page A11
© The Washington Post
As North Carolinians braced for Hurricane Fran's arrival Thursday, this 116-foot flying weather station filled with scientists and 7,000 pounds of tracking and monitoring equipment took off from Tampa at 4 p.m. to chase the storm as it swirled northwest toward the coast.
For more than 10 hours, a 20-member team of hurricane hunters bucked Fran's gusts of up to 130 mph aloft in order to penetrate Fran's 25-mile-wide eye over and over again throughout the night, hoping to help solve the riddle of what makes hurricanes do what they do.
"Buckle up and tie down," warned commander Frank R. Philippsborne, a veteran of the hurricane explorations the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates. The Kermit was one of two planes NOAA sent up Thursday to help measure the effects of the storm.
As the plane descended from 14,000 feet to 5,000, the level at which the crew conducts experiments, it plowed through rain bands that blocked all visibility and left passengers and scientists tightening harnesses that held them in their seats. At its peak, Hurricane Fran was 40,000 to 60,000 feet deep and nearly 600 miles wide, as measured by the reach of her tropical-force winds.
About two hours after takeoff, Kermit caught up to Fran. Thirty miles off the coast of Wilmington, N.C., the plane moved out of a thick bank of clouds and flew into the eye of the storm, a clearing not unlike a hole in a doughnut. The Atlantic Ocean suddenly appeared below and blue sky popped out above.
About a dozen scientists huddled at work stations bolted to the walls of the plane to monitor dozens of probes, scanners and computers that catalogued Fran's every move. The readings gathered in 15-minute bursts were then transmitted to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, where forecasters matched them with readings generated by Doppler radar in Morehead City, N.C.; Wilmington; and in off-shore weather buoys and automatic weather stations along the coast.
NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories Hurricane Research Division flies a half-dozen scientific missions a year to collect data for weather forecasters and conduct experiments that will help them understand the structure and behavior of hurricanes in order to improve predictions.
"It costs about $1 million when an area of coastline is put under a hurricane watch," said the flight's co-chief scientist, Paul Black, a NOAA research meteorologist. That includes evacuation and staging costs and the loss to private industry even before storm damage, he said. A warning in the Gulf of Mexico for winds above 35 knots, for instance, requires all oil rig workers to evacuate.
More accurate predictions that would shrink the area under a watch could save millions a year, Black said. "If we could reduce the area of coastline watch by even 10 miles times five landfalling storms a season, that would be a $100 million savings.
"When these storms come in at an angle like this one, we have a watch stretching from Jupiter Inlet in Florida to Norfolk, Va., but the storm only covered an area a couple hundred miles around Wilmington," he said. Nevertheless, it is better to have issued a broad warning than to have lives lost, Black added.
At 8:05 p.m., after the Kermit had crisscrossed the eye of the storm several times, measurements showed Fran was coming to shore. A crackle came over the intercom and a quiet voice said, "The north wall eye is on the beach." It quickly became clear to those on board that Fran would lose strength and would not have the impact of Hurricane Hugo, the killer storm that devastated the Carolina coast in 1989.
Black watched his screens over the next two hours while Fran met a power greater than herself: cool, dry air that kicked the wind out of her skirt. "Over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, hurricanes can intensify. In this case, an area of cooler, drier air in the mid-levels was pulled into the storm's circulation and weakened the storm on the surface as it was making landfall," Black explained.
NOAA's aircraft program in Tampa is home base for the Kermit and Miss Piggy, the two Lockheed WP-3D Orions that anchor the fleet and fly the bulk of the agency's scientific missions.
In an area near the tail, the skin of each craft is covered with neat rows of red hurricane symbols. Each has a name printed on it with the name of every hurricane the plane has penetrated. As the flight headed back toward home base a waning moon rose over Tampa Bay and crew members readied a red hurricane sticker with the name "Fran."
© Copyright 1996 The Washington Post
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