The Heart of a Storm
February 2, 1998
By Mark Hoover
previous
|
next
I'm writing this dispatch from Carmel, California, and it's
a race to see which goes belly-up first: my computer's
battery, or me. Both of us have been up all night without a
recharge on a remarkable journey through the heart of a
powerful Pacific storm.
Shortly after returning to my hotel this afternoon, the
lights started dimming spasmodically, and then simply went
out—a casualty of the storm
we had just plumbed. Not that I could feel any more
powerless after last night. Strapped in my orange flight
seat, and looking out the window at dawn, I now understood
why a note of reverie shaded the explanations given by the
meteorologists for these stormflights. I had thought that in
an age of robots and remote-control, there was no call for
scientists to put themselves in harm's way. Now I see there
is no substitute.
In an extraordinary piece of luck, the epicenter of the
biggest storm yet this winter moved into position a few
hundred miles from Monterey this weekend, and the
meteorologists of CALJET (the project behind these flights)
scrambled to make the most of their fortune. When I got the
heads-up for the flight, takeoff was set for 10:00 pm, and
was then moved to 2:00 am as the last position reports came
in. The aircrew and scientists assembled at the aviation
center here a little after midnight.
Meanwhile, 100 miles south and north of us, ground-based
stormwatchers sped to precise locations in DOWs, or Dopplers
On Wheels, which look like trucks onto which a small flying
saucer has crashed. Developed to track Oklahoma tornadoes,
the DOWs provide a detailed radar image of the storm as it
reaches the coast.
Our mission was to intercept the storm near its center, and
begin a series of profiling runs at different altitudes,
back and forth across the "fronts," or boundaries, between
warm and cold air. Dropsondes (tiny weather stations
equipped with telemetry radio) dropped through a hatch would
add the third dimension to the emerging picture of the
intricate structures of moving air. Each transit of a front,
particularly the passage from cold air to warm, promised a
rough ride; how rough depended on the windspeeds of the
channels of air-the scientists called them jets-that hurtle
along in front of these boundaries.
The plane was loaded for bear. With nine crewmembers, six
scientists, 50,000 pounds of fuel...and me...we accelerated
down the runway at Monterey airport at a quarter past two,
and headed into a pitch black nigh. What we discovered
surprised-even confounded-the scientists. For over nine
hours we roamed vast corridors of wind and rain in a
shuddering Orion P-3 airplane, taking measurements that
could be gotten no other way.
Join us on February 5 for StormFlight as we recreate this
exciting, sometimes frightening, and extraordinarily
insightful journey into the 100-mile-an-hour winds of a
major Pacific storm.
previous dispatch
|
next dispatch
|
table of contents