Stormy Flying Captures Hurricane Birth

A month spent on a barren island perched off the western coast of Africa allowed NASA scientists to fly a sensor-laden airplane into storms blowing off the continent. Because such storms can gather strength from warm ocean waters and spin up into hurricanes, this was not simply a daredevil mission but a scientific expedition to track such storms from birth to death. With most of the team back in the U.S., one conclusion proved obvious to them: despite the sensors and volume of data collected, it is difficult to tell which storms would ultimately gather hurricane strength.

As soon as storms get into the eastern ocean they undergo a brief period of intensification. Most of these decay the second and third day that they are in the ocean, and a few of them seem to completely disappear, explains meteorologist Edward Zipser of the University of Utah, who was chief mission scientist for the NASA effort based in the Cape Verde Islands. Or we thought that they had disappeared but then they were sort of reborn in the central or west Atlantic and became named storms.