LAKELAND, Fla. — As we face another hurricane season, NOAA hurricane hunters are preparing their fleet and testing out new technologies.
“My job is really to help the pilots figure out where to go,” said Jonathan Zawislak.
As a flight director and meteorologist for NOAA, Zawislak helps guide pilots during hurricane hunter missions in order to get the data they need from the storm as safely as possible.
WATCH NOAA hurricane hunters prepare for hurricane season
“It’s all pretty bad weather up in a hurricane, right, but we want to find the best route. We want to find the best route for the eye wall, find the center, maneuver around those really intense outer rain bands. If we don't have to put the airplane through severe turbulence, we’re not going to do it,” Zawislak said.
Lots of preparation is being done on the hurricane hunter planes at the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center to ensure the fleet and teams are ready to go.
The aircraft is currently being equipped with operational instruments that collect the data needed to understand the storm.
“There are going to be research instruments as well. Those research instruments are the new technology, the future. That we want to sample and experiment with to see how it is going to help us understand the storm in the future and forecast better in the future,” Zawislak said.
NOAA recently began deploying drones that go inside the storm where conditions are the most chaotic and too dangerous for crewed aircraft to go into.
“Our most deployed implementation is these dropsondes. They capture things like GPS data with regard to temperature, windspeed, humidity, pressure. Any type of meteorological parameter that you might want to get and record inside the storm environment. So we’ll pepper the storm with these,” said Nikki Hathaway, Chief of Programs, NOAA Aircraft Operations Center.
While the hurricane hunters are in the air, data is transmitted in real-time to the National Hurricane Center for forecasting and models.
“The entire purpose of the mission and the reason why our crews are deploying into these storm systems is to be sure that the people that are in harm's way are listening to the warnings and listening to your local emergency officials and heeding what they’re saying,” Hathaway said.
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