Hurricane Hunters fly into storms headed to Sacramento region
By MARLEE GINTER
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SACRAMENTO, California (KOVR) — While you hunker down and do everything you can to dodge the storm, a team of hurricane hunters heads right into it.
“We basically drop the instruments into these storms from a high altitude, which is trying to catch as much of the atmosphere as we possibly can,” said Lt. Col. Ryan Rickert.
CBS Sacramento caught up with Lt. Col. Rickert over the phone between missions out of Mather Airport. He’s a flight meteorologist with the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron — better known as the Hurricane Hunters — now gathering data on atmospheric rivers over the Pacific Ocean before the wild weather systems make it to us.
“Yesterday, a prime example, our one airplane that was flying, there’s actually a temperature where our fuel starts to freeze,” he said.
Rickert has already seen the nasty weather headed our way by using instruments to measure it.
“What our research has shown is that this data that we collect helps produce better forecasts of where the AR is going to hit,” he said.
Climate scientist Marty Ralph with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography said not only will it help track the system, but they will also see how strong it will be and how long it will last.
“Well, one of the challenges in the West is knowing which watershed is going to get hit very hard — like, the Cosumnes [River] just a week or so ago got hit very hard,” Ralph said.
Amid a years-long drought in California, dealing with the current string of major storm systems has been very shocking to people across the region. We asked Rickert if there has been a difference in the missions they run.
“I will say the one today was actually very, it was kind of precarious for the crew,” he said Friday.
Their missions can run up to 11 hours long as they drop small cylindrical instruments parachuting into the storms to gather data. They’re gearing up to head back out this weekend and are bracing for a round of missions all next week.
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