NASA Researchers Hope to Learn from Hurricane Earl

A hurricane hunter flies into Hurricane Ike.

One of NASA's flying laboratories took off from Fort Lauderdale Thursday afternoon and set a course for Hurricane Earl. The big storm threatening North Carolina is also an opportunity for scientists to plug some big holes in their hurricane forecasting skill.

When a hurricane develops, people want to know where it’s going -- that's the "track" forecast -- and they'd also like to know how strong it will be when it arrives. That is the "intensity" forecast. Weather scientists like Edward Zipser must provide both.

“The track forecasts are pretty darn good,” he said. “It's the intensity forecasts that are a scientific mystery, and that's why we're here.”

Zipser and a group of colleagues from NASA's Genesis and Rapid Intensification Project are about to take off in a converted DC-8 jetliner to reconnect with Hurricane Earl.

They buzzed the storm several times this weekend, and mission scientist Scott Braun says they found it doing the very thing that NASA wants to understand better.

“It went through rapid intensification from Cat 1 to Cat 4 in two days. That's one of our key objectives,” he said.

And the exciting thing about it, says Zipser, is that the intensification occurred despite a huge mass of dry air and dust that -- according to conventional hurricane wisdom -- should have shut the storm right down.

“The most exciting word in science is not ‘Eureka.’ The most exciting words are ‘That’s funny!’” he said.

“When you don't understand an observation, that's a cue you’re about to learn something new.”

And if they learn something new aboard this aircraft that first flew in 1969, it may be something about the internal processes of hurricanes. Tracking hurricanes takes an understanding of large-scale weather systems that can be easily reduced to mathematical models.

But the clues to intensity are believed to be hidden in complex, small-scale processes that equipment aboard the well-known Hurricane hunter planes doesn't measure well.

“This airplane is looking at phenomena you can’t measure with those airplanes. We have sophisticated radars on board that are giving us information about storm structure that's more detailed than anything the hurricane hunters are going to get,” he said.

And this DC-8 is not the project's only aircraft. Another laboratory plane will be flying from Houston and an unmanned plane -- a version of a military surveillance drone used in Afghanistan -- will be flying to the Atlantic from California.

Edward Zipser says learning to forecast hurricane intensity is important, possibly lifesaving, work.

“If you can't tell the public what the impact is going to be, then you haven’t really done the important part of the job. If the intensity forecast is Cat 1 and the storm is Category 4, that's disastrous.”