How pilots fly into hurricanes’ eyes for vital forecast information

WINK News meteorologist Nash Rhodes speaks to one of the pilots in the cockpits of the specially-equipped aircraft that plays a vital role in hurricane forecasting.

You could call Lt. Com. Kevin Doremus a kind of thrill-seeker: He flew Kermit, a four-engine turboprop airplane, directly into the eye of Hurricane Dorian in 2019 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and considers that flight one of the most impactful of his career.

“I love it; I definitely think that, you know, there’s a lot of adrenaline involved,” Doremus said. “Mostly because we were flying it actively. When it was a Cat[egory] 5, a stable, really powerful Cat 5, and in the eye, you look down and you can see the islands below us. And that was kind of a sombering experience.”

Doremus uses a bumpy ride into Category 4 Hurricane Laura in 2020 to paint a picture of what it’s like to head into a tropical system. He compares it to a ride on an old, wooden roller coaster.

“You get those ups and downs and you kind of float out of your seat a little bit, and then you hit the bottom and you get pushed into your seat,” Doremus said.

The Hurricane Hunters perform both research and reconnaissance missions.

“We launched a number of [probes] out of a storm, they fall through all the different layers of the atmosphere all the way down to the surface and send back really, really important information such as temperature, pressure, humidity, dew point, and GPS, direct wind speed—and all that information is coming up to the airplanes that are in flight, meteorologists are looking at the data,” Doremus said. “One of the most important for a reconnaissance mission is where is the eye? And how strong are the winds in the eyewall? And how low is the pressure in the actual eye of the storm? And that’s what allows us to tell people on the ground, ‘Hey, this is going to be a problem for you, or it’s not going to be that bad.'”

These pilots spend around eight hours inside a storm, with mission altitude anywhere between 8,000 and 12,000 feet above the ground, delivering vital information to keep us safe.

“There are no weather stations in the middle of the Atlantic, there are not sensors all over that they can use to sample the storms,” Doremus said. “We are that flying weather station, to take those instruments to where the scientists need them to be.”