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1 big thing

Inside the eye of a hurricane

1 big thing

Axios

News

42K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What's it like to fly into the eye of a hurricane? Niala joins a team of NOAA Hurricane hunters tracking Hurricane Lee to understand the science gathered on these missions, and how it helps create the forecasts that millions depend upon. Plus, monitoring AI for hate speech. And, the FDA approves updated COVID-19 vaccines. Guests: Axios' Russell Contreras and Adriel Bettelheim; NOAA's Alan Hough, Jack Parrish and Kevin Doremus. Credits: Axios Today is produced by Niala Boodhoo, Alexandra Botti, Fonda Mwangi, Robin Linn and Alex Sugiura. Music is composed by Evan Viola. You can reach us at [email protected]. You can send questions, comments and story ideas to Niala as a text or voice memo to 202-918-4893. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Good morning. Welcome, Axios today. It's Tuesday, September 12th. I'm Nailibudu. Here's

0:08.6

what you need to know today, monitoring AI for hate speech. Plus, the FDA approves updated

0:14.2

COVID-19 vaccines. But first, inside the eye of a hurricane, that's today's one big thing.

0:21.7

This is some of what you hear on board a NOAA Hurricane Hunter flight, where scientists

0:37.7

and crews fly into a storm to collect huge amounts of data. And over the weekend, I flew

0:43.3

with them on a plane nicknamed Kermit into Hurricane Lee. I have lived through and covered

0:48.2

many, many hurricanes in my lifetime. But this was a rare chance to experience a storm in the

0:53.3

air. Over about eight hours, the dozen or so scientists on Kermit use instrumentation on board

0:58.9

to collect not just the basics, like rainfall, wind speed, and barometric pressure, but also so

1:04.4

much other data. The plane, for example, has a radar that measures the size of the wave heights

1:09.8

underneath the hurricane. Our mission is to learn as much as we can about the storm systems that

1:14.6

are threat mostly to the United States and in the Caribbean islands a lot of times.

1:20.4

That's NOAA Corps Lieutenant Commander Alan Hauke after he gave me my safety briefing. I was the

1:25.8

only non-NoAA person on this flight. Our plan was to get as close as possible to the actual center

1:31.5

of the eye of the storm. The eye wall around that has the most intense winds and weather.

1:36.7

We set out to do six passes in and out of the eye. Jack Parrish has been flying through storms for

1:42.3

NOAA for more than 40 years. He was this mission's flight director. The tail gun that you saw in

1:47.4

the airplane before we took off. That's a tailed-double radar essentially doing cat scans. They

1:54.1

are in the vertical on all sides of the airplane. The pilots let me stay up in the cockpit for the

1:58.7

first half of the flight and it's really loud on these planes. So I recorded us talking through our

2:03.2

headsets. This is intense flying. The pilot team rotates seats opt into stay fresh. Here's

2:09.1

Lieutenant Commander Kevin DeRiemis. So this particular storm is challenging because every time

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