Hurricane Hunters fly into Helene
Air Force Reserve crews completed nine reconnaissance flights into Hurricane Helene between 23rd and 26th September, providing crucial data for forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) as the storm intensified before making landfall in Florida.
The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, based at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, first flew into the storm on 23rd September. By the time it struck Florida’s Big Bend area on 26th September, Helene had grown into a powerful Category 4 hurricane.
Although satellite technology plays a key role in tracking storms, forecasters face challenges when dealing with hurricanes over oceans, where data is sparse.
Satellites cannot measure critical factors such as a hurricane’s minimum sea level pressure, wind speed, or internal structure — all vital for predicting the storm’s path and strength. Lt. Col. Ryan Rickert, a reconnaissance weather officer with the 53rd Squadron, highlighted the importance of on-the-ground data, noting that on 26th September, he directed his crew to fly directly into the eye of the storm to gather this information.
Flying WC-130J Super Hercules aircraft, the squadron’s crews navigate hurricanes at altitudes ranging from 500 to 1,500 feet for low-level investigations, and up to 10,000 feet for more comprehensive “fix missions”.
During these missions, they fly through the storm’s eye four to six times, releasing dropsondes—devices that record temperature, wind speed, humidity, and pressure as they descend. These flights become more frequent as the storm nears land, sometimes occurring every six hours.
The data collected by these missions, including surface wind speeds and flight-level information, is sent to the NHC to help refine forecasts and issue accurate warnings for storms in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and eastern Pacific. The squadron also conducts survey missions to explore areas of interest within developing weather systems.
The invaluable information gathered by these Hurricane Hunter flights significantly improves the accuracy of hurricane forecasts, ensuring that authorities and the public have the best possible understanding of dangerous storms like Hurricane Helene.
Amaryllis Cotto, 53rd WRS ARWO, said: “A survey mission is a non-standardised flying pattern for the purpose of investigating certain regions of a system, before it’s well developed.
“The data collected in the survey mission gives NHC forecasters a better understanding of how the system is behaving and its interaction with the surrounding environment.
“The dropsonde data is also ingested in the models, which produces a better forecast track and intensity output,” she said. “The data we provide is very valuable.”
IMAGE: A satellite image of Hurricane Helene moving into the Gulf of Mexico taken by NOAA’s GOES-16 (GOES East) satellite at 3:51 pm (ET) on Sept. 25, 2024. (Image credit: NOAA)
