Santa Rosa scientist recounts flight into Hurricane Dorian as it pummeled Bahamas

Flying through Hurricane Dorian seven times last weekend as the monster storm pummeled the Bahamas with 185-mph winds would have been gut-wrenching for many, if not most people.

But Lucrezia Ricciardulli, a scientist who specializes in satellite measurement of ocean conditions, relished the chance to go inside one of the planet’s most powerful and destructive weather events.

“When you think about where you are it’s pretty freaky,” Ricciardulli said this week, back at her desk on the second floor of a downtown Santa Rosa office building.

The bumpy rides across the 200-mile-wide storm were punctuated by violent downdrafts that seized the propeller-driven hurricane hunter aircraft, prompting one of the pilots to shove the throttle hard forward to regain an altitude of about 8,000 feet over the roiling Atlantic Ocean.

Ricciardulli, a 51-year-old mother of two who doesn’t care for roller coasters, was unperturbed.

“I thought I was lucky,” she said. “You’re detached from Earth. It’s an amazing feeling.”

The danger was obvious “but it didn’t translate into fear,” said Ricciardulli, a staff scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, a Santa Rosa company that specializes in computer programming used to measure Earth’s climate. She said she trusted the experience of the veteran National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pilots and the sturdy Orion P3, a 117-foot long aircraft that has served multiple missions in war and peace since the 1960s.

Ricciardulli went aloft Saturday and Sunday aboard a NOAA aircraft nicknamed Kermit the Frog, with a bright green toy version of the former Sesame Street star hanging from a chain over the plane’s windshield.

But the work by about 10 scientists was serious, using radar and other instruments to determine wind speed and direction, rainfall, atmospheric pressure, ocean surface temperature and other parameters from the storm that was named Hurricane Dorian on Aug. 28 and had grown to a Category 4 hurricane by Saturday.

Their tools included dropsondes, expendable weather reconnaissance devices dropped through a tube in the cabin that measure wind, pressure, temperature and humidity as they fall, suspended from parachutes, to the ocean in three minutes. Some dropsondes are designed to measure subsurface conditions as they sink into the ocean.

NOAA satellites use microwave signals to track hurricanes from space, but the twice-daily hurricane hunter flights from a base in Lakeland, Florida, provide direct contact with the elements. That data, transmitted to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, enables NOAA experts to issue forecasts for the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Local officials depend on accurate predictions of where and when the storm will make landfall to plan evacuations, along with the expected storm surge, since flooding typically inflicts most hurricane damage.

“You cannot evacuate too early or too late,” Ricciardulli said, recalling Sonoma County’s experience with the deadly 2017 wildfires.

By Saturday, Dorian had stalled over the Bahamas, wedged between two high pressure systems as it pummeled the island nation. Supercomputer models accurately predicted it would miss Florida, but on Wednesday the southeast coastal states - Georgia and the Carolinas - were bracing for possible harm as the storm moved slowly north.

Ricciardulli’s first flight left Lakeland at 4 a.m. Saturday for an eight-hour round trip to the storm.

The plane’s cabin was spartan, with just 20 seats placed alone or in pairs at work stations facing large instrument panels.

The seats were military style, with four-point harnesses that had to be fastened for about one-third of the flight.

Turbulence increased as the turboprop plane approached the hurricane. It took about half an hour to cross the entire storm, but the worst of it came as the aircraft crossed the eye wall, where the storm’s strongest winds whirled counterclockwise around the eye.

In two or three minutes, the airplane passed through the wall, moving into the “totally peaceful” eye, Ricciardulli said, with no wind and a bright blue sky above. The respite lasted but a few minutes, as the aircraft then punched through the far side of the wall.

On Saturday, the eye wall was roaring at 155 mph, near the top of the scale for a Category 4 storm. By Sunday it had ramped up to 185 mph, tying Dorian for second place among Atlantic hurricanes documented since the 1850s. Hurricane Allen set the record for sustained winds at 190 mph in 1980.

Dorian also set a record for “rapid intensification” on Sunday, with peak winds accelerating from about 150 to 185 mph in just nine hours.

When the plane landed Sunday in New Orleans, diverted from its Florida base to keep it clear of the storm, crew members wearing blue flight suits had a look in their eyes reflecting the strain of the extreme conditions they had experienced, Ricciardulli said.

In the air, however, the crew had performed with a professional and reassuring calm.

“You know you’re in good hands,” she said. “You become really aware that you trust them.”

José J. Hernández Ayala, an assistant professor and Climate Research Center director at Sonoma State University, monitored Dorian from the time it threatened his homeland of Puerto Rico. Fortunately, it skimmed past the island nation that had been devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017, a Category 4 storm that lingered directly over Puerto Rico for 12 hours and dropped up to 40 inches of rain in three days.

Hernández Ayala and a colleague published a paper this year concluding that a warming climate had made events like Maria nearly five times more probable than they were in the 1950s.

Dorian, which lingered over the Bahamas for nearly two days, was “a nightmare,” he said.

No single storm can be attributed to climate change, he and Ricciardulli said, but the trend toward more frequent and severe storms is clear. The tropical Atlantic Ocean’s temperature is rising, injecting more water into the atmosphere and more energy into storms, Ricciardulli said.

There have been five Category 5 hurricanes in the past four years and before that a record eight such storms between 2000 and 2009.

The work NOAA does forecasting those monster hurricanes is the real deal, Ricciardulli said, recalling the barrage of hail hitting the windshield of the plane cutting through Dorian.

“It’s about saving lives,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.