FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM In the cabin of the Gulfstream IV weatherplane "Gonzo," airborne at 43,000 feet, meteorologists Barry Damiano, above left, and Stanley Czyzyk studied information flanked by data stations during a weather flight over a winter storm north of Hawaii. Monday's flight took seven hours and covered 3,000 miles.

Weather scientists used Honolulu
to launch weather reconnaissance

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By Diana Leone
dleone@starbulletin.com

GOnzo left Honolulu Tuesday, after two months of gathering weather data over the North Pacific that helped predict the course of winter storms on the U.S. mainland.

On its last round-trip flight out of Honolulu Monday, the plane (named by its crew after the Sesame Street character), covered about 2,800 miles in a seven-hour loop northeast of the main Hawaiian Islands.

The eight-man crew dropped 15 probes that measured air temperature, humidity, wind direction and wind speed as they fell through the Polar jet stream, one of the "rivers" of air constantly flowing from west to east across the North Pacific.

These measurements were accessible to National Weather Service forecasters within 30 minutes and helped them more precisely predict how much rain or snow the Northwest Coast could expect last night.

FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM The view looking out of the aircraft's aft window.

Gonzo and crew's annual summer job is to drop the same sensors over the North Atlantic, giving meteorologists information that has improved U.S. hurricane forecasting accuracy by 20 percent, said Stanley Czyzyk, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration project manager and meteorologist.

The winter storm information gathered over the Pacific improves West Coast forecasting, which typically is done without large amounts of data, Czyzyk said.

Of particular interest this year was data about storms headed for Salt Lake City, during the Winter Olympics.

The $43 million Gulfstream IV jet is the only one of its kind in the NOAA's fleet of weather-watching planes. Since 1998, the plane has flown one month in the Pacific each winter. This year it flew two months, a total of 155 hours flying time, with half of that based out of Anchorage and the past month out of Honolulu.

About two hours before their 10 a.m. takeoff Monday, members of the eight-man crew finalized their flight plan, including precisely where they would drop the probes, which are called dropwindsondes, or sondes for short.

Several members of the crew have worked for NOAA for 20 or more years and were part of a special mission to Hawaii for Hurricanes Dora and Eugene in 1999.

"I've personally been on 325 hurricane penetrations," in another NOAA aircraft, the Lockheed P-3 Orion, said Alan Goldstein, chief of science and engineering on this flight. The record-holder has more than 500 hurricane penetrations, he added.

FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM This aircraft named "Gonzo," a member of NOAA's "Hurricane Hunters" fleet, stood ready Monday at Honolulu Airport.

But Gonzo wasn't meant to go to the eye of a hurricane, as the two P-3s do. (Their nicknames are Miss Piggy and Kermit.)

Gonzo's purpose is to go higher and faster. The P-3s can't fly above 27,000 feet. Commercial jets usually cruise at 32,000 to 38,000 feet. The Gulfstream IV can fly as high as 45,000 feet.

"This plane isn't quite as glamorous as the P-3s punching through the eye of the storm," Goldstein said. "But it gets the data to the people that need it."

The dropwindsondes that collect the data are unassuming cardboard tubes, about 3 inches in diameter and a little more than a foot long. They weigh less than a pound and are positioned by a tiny parachute.

FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM This dropwindsonde weather instrument was dropped from the Gulfstream IV weather-monitoring plane into the storm below to transmit data back to the aircraft.

Their onboard microprocessors send Gonzo's main computer about a megabyte of data during their 12- to 14-minute fall from the sky. When they hit the ocean, their job is over.

The meteorologist in charge on each flight, which on Monday was Barry Damiano, runs the raw data through a computer program that cleans it of most technological glitches. He zaps the info via satellite and Internet connections to National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Md., where it is blended with the other available data and is almost immediately available across the country.

On Monday the first drop was more than an hour into the flight. Electronic technicians Dale Carpenter and Damon Sans Souci prepared each sonde for its drop by a computer diagnostic test of its instruments. Then they place the sonde in the drop chute and await the countdown from Damiano.

The probe exits with a whoosh like something being sent through a pneumatic tube. When a technician pulls a lever to close the chute it sounds like a screen door banging shut.

As the sonde falls, it transmits information twice a second.

A lot of times the data are what the crew expects. But, for example, wind speed can vary as much as 20, 30 or even 40 mph from what was predicted.

"That's why we're out here," Czyzyk said.

The next five hours are punctuated regularly by the same routine, with another sonde dropped about every 20 minutes. On this day, the operation goes like clockwork. Nothing breaks. There's no severe weather.

"That's how we like it," said Damiano with a grin.

Though the probes are small, the crew takes extensive steps to make sure they don't release them above other planes. "We don't believe the sondes would damage an aircraft, but we're not prepared to drop one on an aircraft," said pilot Bob McCann.

Obviously Gonzo can't be everywhere. Said Czyzyk: "We're looking for sensitive areas, areas that might have an impact."