Into the Eye Of Ivan

By J. MADELEINE NASH /TAMPA BAY; Kristina Dell

THE BIG TURBOPROP LUMBERS DOWN a runway at MacDill Air Force Base, rises awkwardly into the air and heads northwest from Tampa Bay over the Gulf of Mexico. For a couple of hours, it glides through an aerial fairyland, maneuvering around sun-struck clouds that resemble turreted castles. "This isn't so bad," I say to my seatmate, Miami-based meteorologist Joe Cione, who looks at me and laughs. It's about then that I realize the pilot has executed a sweeping U-turn and pointed the plane's nose in Hurricane Ivan's direction.

Soon sheets of rain whip against the plane's windows, dissolving the reassuring sight of the wings. On the radar screen in front of my seat, the red of the eyewall--the circle of turbulent storms that surrounds a hurricane's eye--grows thicker and more menacing. "The red fingers of death," pilot Mike Silah jokes grimly, and as if on cue, the plane--a Lockheed WP-3D Orion operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)--starts to pitch, roll and yaw, a small boat at the mercy of giant, invisible waves. I tighten the straps of my shoulder harness as the plane shakes violently. My seat drops out from under me, and for a moment, I experience the sickening feeling of free fall.

More than 40 people are thought to have died during Ivan's terrifying assault on the U.S., and many more might have died had people not taken the warnings issued by forecasters so seriously. For this, says Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, part of the credit goes to aerial reconnaissance and surveillance missions similar to the one I'm on. The reams of data collected by each flight--"enough to choke a horse on," is how Mayfield puts it--have increased the credibility of hurricane landfall projections, and that, in turn, has prompted more people to evacuate to higher ground. Last week, for example, hundreds of thousands fled New Orleans, removing themselves from the threat of a storm surge in Lake Pontchartrain that could have flooded a city that lies largely below sea level.

The plane I'm riding in is itself a flying data-collecting instrument, with an air- sampling rod protruding from its nose and three radar units fastened to its nose, belly and tail. In addition, it has a pipe in the fuselage for launching sensor-loaded canisters known as dropwindsondes, sleek probes that take continuous readings of wind speeds, temperature, pressure and humidity as they parachute down. By combining the data obtained by multiple dropwindsondes, computer models can recon- struct the environment both inside and outside a hurricane, identifying conditions that feed or sap its strength or steer it in a particular direction. As a result, five-day hurricane-track forecasts are as accurate today as three-day forecasts were 15 years ago.

Predicting just how strong a hurricane will grow, however, remains more art than science, which is why my seatmate, NOAA scientist Joe Cione, has been seeding the Gulf with devices known as AXBTs (airborne expendable bathythermo- graphs), which measure the temperature of the water column. The chief weakness of hurricane- intensity forecasts, Cione believes, is the lack of information about the state of the ocean as a storm churns through. Warm water, after all, provides the fuel that supplies a hurricane with energy, and in Ivan's case, Cione is surprised to find that the water in this region of the Gulf is not as warm as he thought, suggesting that Ivan might weaken before hitting land--which, as it turns out, it did.

As the WP-3D makes its sixth pass through the tumult of the eyewall, Cione begins to look a little pale. "How many more are we going to make?" he groans. I too am savoring the calm as the plane traverses the eye. Ivan's is a big eye, some 40 miles across, and a mean-looking one too, occluded by glowering clouds. Jack Parrish, the senior NOAA scientist in charge, thinks some of these may be half-digested remnants of an earlier eyewall around which Ivan has regrouped. Big hurricanes sometimes form concentric eyewalls, he says, and that makes flying through them all the more unnerving.

Even under optimal conditions, gathering data by flying into hurricanes is never fun. Yet these gut-wrenching passes are extremely valuable. For with each one, Paul Chang, a NOAA researcher who works on remote sensing technology, amasses more information about how his instruments operate, and that information, he says, will allow him to calibrate similar instruments mounted on satellites. Someday he and his colleagues may be able to monitor the dynamic surface wind field in the vicinity of a hurricane at a comfortable remove.

At long last a loud whoosh announces the fall of the last dropwindsonde. Over the radio, Parrish's voice signals the end of the mission. By now, even Parrish is getting weary of the nine-hour flights that have been taking off daily for eight days running, ever since Ivan blew up into a hurricane, not far from St. Croix. Attacked by fierce winds and savage rains, NOAA's fleet of hurricane hunters (two WP-3Ds and a Gulfstream IV) is showing signs of stress as well. The protective coating on the stabilizer of the plane I'm riding in is beginning to erode, for example. And while it's not an immediate threat, it would be nice, everyone agrees, to have a little downtime to repair it.

This year, however, downtime has been hard to find. Following 25 relatively quiet years, 1995 marked the beginning of what many scientists believe could be a decades-long phase of hurricane hyperactivity. So far this year, 11 named storms have arisen in the Atlantic, and seven have hit the U.S.

And it's not over. Even as Ivan's tattered remnants saturated the Southeast with flooding rains, Jeanne was menacing the Dominican Republic, and a storm called Karl was gathering force in the Atlantic. NOAA's hurricane hunters are not going to get much rest just yet, it seems, and they may not until Nov. 30, when the all-too-memorable 2004 hurricane season finally recedes into history. With reporting by Ruth Laney/Baton Rouge, Tim Padgett/Miami, Michael Peltier/Tallahassee and Frank Sikora/Birmingham

With reporting by Ruth Laney/Baton Rouge; Tim Padgett/Miami; Michael Peltier/Tallahassee; Frank Sikora/Birmingham