WEBVTT

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(booming)

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- [Male Reporter] Breaking news a massive

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Category 4 hurricane is heading
straight for the east coast.

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- [Female Reporter 1] More
than one million people

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have been told to evacuate.

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- [Shepherd Smith] Millions of Americans

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are now bracing for this storm.

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- [Female Reporter 2]
Bring catastrophic flooding

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with more than three feet of rain.

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- On average, it costs a million dollars

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to evacuate a mile of coastline.

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So, the tighter you have that forecast,

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the fewer people are evacuating.

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The forecast is between 25 or 30 percent

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more accurate with our data.

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- It kinda helps narrow
that cone of uncertainty

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down exactly where the storm is gonna hit.

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If we had not been
providing that information,

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can you just imagine how many more

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lives would have been lost.

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(uplifting music)

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- From a pilot perspective,
flying into hurricane

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goes against everything
that we are trained.

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Which is, avoid weather,
avoid weather, avoid weather.

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You don't really know what to expect.

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'Cause every single storm is different.

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Always, always, always, respect the storm.

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- Hurricane's are formed
over the ocean basins,

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over warm water, you get
a lot of evaporation,

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then they start forming more vertically,

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and get that cyclonic rotation to them,

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they get stronger, they
have the capability

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of growing higher up in the atmosphere,

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and therefore, becoming hurricanes.

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- In that moment, when
I go out to that plane,

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for me, it's game on.

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When you have tornadoes,

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you have the excessive amount of rain,

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you have have ice, lighting,
we've been struck by lightning.

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Well the information that
we gather from the flight

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is provided from the instrument
that I drop into the storm,

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which again, is the dropsonde.

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- The type of data that
we're able to gather

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from our flights, is
anything from time, location,

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temperature, dew-point,
wind direction, wind speed,

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pressures, heights, rain
rates, surface wind speeds.

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- The satellites will
provide a good map picture,

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let's say it's map of the
United States, whereas our data

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helps them develop a
street map, if you would.

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- When we fly an INVEST,

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which an investigation
into a potential storm,

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we fly 500 to 1000 feet
off the ocean surface,

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we fly all four quadrants of that storm.

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And what we're doing at that time,

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is investigating to
see where the winds are

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and if there's gonna be a
circular formation that forms.

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If there's that circular
formation that forms,

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we know we have a storm.

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- [Maj Gautraud] The stadium affect

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is the inside eyewall of a hurricane.

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- Sure enough, it's calm inside,

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with these blue skies
and there's a stadium.

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And I'm like, no way, this is so cool.

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- It's very rare to see and you're inside,

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what's basically, a football
stadium made of clouds.

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What's special about the Hurricane Hunters

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being a Reserve mission,
is that we get to keep

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the continuity and not have a turn over

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of personnel every three years,

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like you may have on Active Duty.

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- Reserve citizen
airmen, provide a variety

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of different backgrounds
from the civilian worlds.

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So, for instance, in my situation,

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where I'm an airline pilot,
our weather officers,

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a lot of them work in weather

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as forecasters, as meteorologists.

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- The most gratifying aspect of my job,

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is knowing that lives are being saved.

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- There's really nothing
we can do to stop it,

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but we can be there to collect the data,

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so that they know where
the storm is going next.

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- If people can get out and
evacuate and save lives,

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that's the most rewarding thing.

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(uplifting music)