A Flight to the Top of the Most Powerful Hurricane Ever

A Flight to the Top of the Most Powerful Hurricane Ever :J

WHEN JAMES DOYLE first started watching a tropical depression in the eastern Pacific about two weeks ago, he didn’t think much of it. A meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Doyle studies the strongest hurricanes and typhoons. The depression in the Pacific didn’t look like anything special, and his computer models predicted it would more or less stay that way.

But Doyle knew that conditions in the Pacific this year were particularly favorable to hurricane development, so he got a research plane ready to go just in case things got interesting. It would prove to be one of the best decisions of his career. Over the next few days, the depression grew into a tropical storm, and then into a Category 1 hurricane—Patricia. Then, almost overnight, Patricia strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane with the highest sustained wind speeds ever recorded. And it was headed straight for the west coast of Mexico.

The speed of Patricia’s intensification stunned scientistsaround the world, including Doyle. The deep layer of warm water in the Pacific this year fueled the storm, and it got lucky by hitting a patch of calm and humid air. But all the models took those factors into account, and none of them even got close to predicting just how strong Patricia would become. Doyle didn’t know what the models were missing, exactly, but he had a good guess as to where to look for it: At the top of the hurricane, more than 35,000 feet above the ocean, where storms exhale the air they suck in from below.

“The typical hurricane research aircraft doesn’t sample high enough,” Doyle says. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s famed Hurricane Hunters fly through the middle of a storm. But this year, Doyle had another option: a sleek, twin-jet, Cold War-era bomber called the WB-57.

The US Air Force put the B-57 Canberra into service in 1953 and stopped flying them in the 1970s, but in recent years NASA got its hands on a few of the surviving examples (of a slightly later model called the WB-57F) and tricked them out for high altitude research. It costs a lot to fly one of these planes, so Doyle wasn’t about to deploy it for just any old hurricane. “We really wanted a significant storm, a stronger storm,”—the kind of storm that could say something new about how hurricanes intensify. To the west coast of Mexico, Patricia was terrifying; for Doyle, it was a scientific dream come true.