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Hurricane Hunters fly into Flossie

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Chris Vadnais
  • Air Force Print News
HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii --  As Hurricane Flossie made its way across the Pacific, officials at military installations on the island of Oahu ran checklists and otherwise tried to prepare for the worst.

Meanwhile, a few Airmen were doing the unthinkable: making trips directly into the eye of the category four storm.

The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron's Hurricane Hunters out of Keesler Air Force Base, MS, flew missions into the storm from Hickam, gathering information the National Weather Service uses to classify storms and predict their behavior.

"We have a meteorologist on board that takes different readings," said Capt. Brad Boudreaux, a C-130 pilot with the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. "We can measure temperature and pressure, winds, all the way from our altitude down to the surface," he said.

All that information goes to the National Weather Service, which pools it with data from various other sources.

"They can compute it all and put it all together and let everybody know where the storm's headed and what to expect from it," said Capt. Bordeaux.

Chasing storms is a risky business. For all the advances satellite technology brought to meteorology, it still can't be used to determine wind speed and barometric pressure-two of the things forecasters use to predict a hurricane's size and path.

Ships cannot usually be used, either, since the winds of such storms create dangerous waves.

For that data, one must go up inside the storm itself.

"We go right into it," said Capt. Boudreaux. "Once you poke through the wall-go into the eye of the storm-everything kind of smoothes out for a while, and then you go right back through it again," he said.

The Air Force Reserve Command sent four of the specially equipped C-130 Hurricane Hunters to Hickam. With these aircraft, the 53rd's crews can make as many trips into the storm as necessary to provide the most current data to the National Weather Center.