Word: planes
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...