imagine being given an opportunity to
explore part of nature that no one has
ever seen or very few people I’m talking
about the inside of a volcano that’s
active the center of the earth the
deepest trenches outer space well I had
just such an opportunity after working
for many years developing instruments to
measure change
acid rain global warming ozone depletion
really weather instruments but
scientific grade the Navy came to me
after I wrote them a white paper and
they said hey we want you to help us
work on this problem week we can predict
where hurricanes are going but we can’t
predict what they’ll do when they get
there that is the intensity so a large
scientific community’s been working on
this for many decades and this was an
incredible opportunity so if you
remember back from science class
hurricanes are these devastating storms
they’re massive but no two storms are
the same and it turns out that they only
start away from the equator they need
warm water high sea surface temperatures
cooperative winds in the upper air we
call the upper part of the storm and you
also have to have high humidity in a
series of cooperating factors that lead
to Genesis and once they get going the
Coriolis effects that’s in in the
northern hemisphere they spin
counterclockwise in the southern
hemisphere the other way and the trick
is it’s a heat engine the Sun is really
the engine that pushes the storm forward
so the warm water at the base gets
pulled up into the eye and thrusts out
the top and what’s called the outflow
now we’ve been flying into hurricanes
for many years and here’s an example of
the hurricane tracks from the season to
2015 for the Atlantic Basin and you can
see that the storm tracks kind of a
random and sometimes you know one will
shoot from the East Coast the United
States over to Europe and some of them
will die out in the middle of the ocean
but you don’t hear about a lot of these
until they make landfall because when
they make landfall bad things
happen it turns out out in the deep
ocean the deep water below what’s called
the thermocline regulates the intensity
of these storms now take a look at that
red trace near cuba that storm we’re
gonna talk about in a couple of minutes
was hurricane joaquin it turned out to
be a category four it went down towards
Cuba and it took a 180 and it headed
straight north so this is how he blue
see in the lower left he’s a professor
in Oklahoma and when he was at the same
time I was a student here in the early
80s he developed the total tornado
observatory with Alba Derrida colleague
at NOAA and the idea was to put this
thing out in front of a tornado and
hopefully it would measure the intensity
he tried this for a couple of years and
he finally concluded this is a gonna be
statistically impossible to get in front
of a tornado but B if I do I’m gonna
kill myself or one of my colleagues so
he sort of gave up on it but he actually
got an entire generation of students
interested in science and meteorology
which was a great great contribution so
about 10 12 years later in 1996 the
movie twister came out and that’s Helen
Hunt playing the scientist Joe and she’s
trying to deploy Dorothy was just really
toto and I wrote a paper on our team
wrote a paper to the Navy saying hey
let’s do Dorothy from above let’s fly an
airplane over it by the way the movie
got a lot of things right except for the
flying cows cows don’t fly people fly if
you haven’t seen twister I highly
recommend it it’s a very popular film
back in 96 a lot of fun so we had been
playing with these disposable weather
sensors called drop Suns
and the idea with this thing is that it
falls and it takes what’s a data set
called a sounding so it transmits back
to the delivery vehicle you can also put
these on a balloon it goes up or it
comes down it’s the same thing but as it
falls or as it goes up at the balloon it
measures the wind speed in the direction
it also measures the pressure
temperature humidity it’s a little
weather station and expendable and runs
off a battery and we’ve had experience
here we are playing around with one of
the University of Massachusetts nearby
and a nice day we’re going to about to
launch the weather balloon by the way
that’s taught a land near the cylinder
tank
with the yellow shirt on he’s one of the
engineers he’s class of 1980 and we’re
basically on a nice day trying to
collect this data and experiment and
tweak the instrument and get the
engineering right by the way the data is
often presented in this chart and the on
the lower left corner it’s called a skew
tee and that’s essentially all the
parameters plotted together it’s what
meteorologists care about now jump to
professor carry a manual here
he’s class in 1973 he’s an MIT
meteorology professor he challenged the
Navy with this sort of grand science
problem he said look the earth is
spherical galaxies are spherical
hurricanes are spherical all the laws of
nature have to do with radius and
distance and here we are using gridded
computer models why are we doing this
why don’t we use three Oracle equations
so he had a very different way and he
sort of pioneered this idea of
predicting hurricanes but he said
unfortunately I need to know this number
I need to know the ocean atmospheric
coupling of energy that is the warmth
that the water mixing in with the air
temperature the thermodynamic forces and
also the momentum that is the wind and
the waves coupling and he said if I
could get this measurement all you have
to do is go down to the base of the
eyewall and get it now it turns out
that’s a pretty deadly area the winds
can be very very high there in fact it’s
very hard to even measure them we don’t
even know how high they are and we
started out thinking how what could
possibly go wrong this sounds like fun
and like many things in life you get
into a problem and you all of a sudden
realize oh man why did I agree to do
this so we kept at it and after a brief
time we realized you can’t design a
one-size-fits-all robot to do this you
have many different types of aircraft
you have jets you have turbo props some
fly low and they’re not pressurized but
these are all the the commonly used
types of aircraft the lower right-hand
corner the Air Force Reserves fly
routinely the Hurricane Hunters they’re
Hercules very tough plane about ten
thousand feet altitude into the
hurricane and they make a couple of
measurements so they’re dropping drops
Ahn’s by hand I should add that we
weren’t the first to this by any stretch
this had been done manually well
we were doing is high-definition that is
many sensors with very high sampling
speed so this was the little beginning
of the robot we we thought we’d call it
the airborne sounding system at first
but everything needs a good acronym to
get funded so we ended up calling it the
a DD which is a little side joke as most
people know I’m a DD but the a DD is
consist of a drum and a bunch of custom
electronics and a radio receiver and
it’s a sort of a soda machine and it
drops the Sonde’s which is cylindrical
about the size of a soda can and it
drops them in as they fall they transmit
back to the plane so it went through
many iterations on the top of this
picture this was an early prototype we
had a pressurized version you can kind
of see I’m testing a hand dropped one on
the dc-8 which is like a jetliner
which has a tube and you open it and
drop it out so we did lots of testing
called flight testing over a period of
years you’re looking at about five years
of engineering time so it took a long
time to kind of get to the point where
we could do something real but then
along one of the things it’s the Navy
often gives you just enough rope to hang
yourself by the way it’s the Office of
Naval Research funded us and there
they’re our nation’s oldest research
laboratory they’ve done a lot of
important things and they said oh by the
way you have to do an intercomparison
because nobody’s going to believe you if
you have this sensor this new system and
it doesn’t compare so you have to be
ready to defend your data so here’s an
inter comparison we did on the navy twin
otter off the coast of california and
after a lot of work it compared quite
well and we had to develop cameras to
watch make sure the sensor wouldn’t hit
the airplane a lot of details here we
are at 12 miles up 62,000 feet and if
you look carefully at the top center of
the screen there’s one of the sensors
going out at 450 miles an hour
and it turns out getting the sensor out
the door is only half the problem
because half the time they would
self-destruct is a very light weight
they’re mostly styrofoam and paper and I
turned out to be quite a challenge to
get to work by the way that’s the view
of hurricane Erika in 2015 we finally
got to this plane they they really
wanted us to get to a drone but one of
the parts of this story is the road kept
changing it was like the yellow brick
road and every year something happened
no money or the plane was too
so we didn’t end up going to a drone we
went to this plane now this is one of
the most famous planes in our history
that you’ve never heard of we’ve all
heard of the u2 this is the WB 57 which
is able to fly at about the same height
but take a look at the size of the jet
engines they’re about the diameter of
the fuselage this plane looks like
something out of Star Wars and there’s
only three left flying it used to be an
Air Force bomber and this is a case
where we we hammered swords into
plowshares we’ve turned this into a
scientific laboratory in the sky and
basically the the dispenser became a
double unit because this plane costs a
hundred thousand dollars a day to fly so
we didn’t want to have any unnecessary
return to base scenarios because unlike
the jetliner where I could walk over and
turn a screw or adjust a knob you can’t
do that because you can’t breathe
there’s no one on the plane it’s
literally lucky UAV so it’s a single
pilot airplane with a backseat navigator
and it’s quite a crew to run it so
standing next to me is astronaut Greg
Johnson who was the pilot on the shuttle
that on the mission STS 125 that went up
and repaired the Hubble Space Telescope
so he’s a retired Navy captain Navy test
pilot been to space many times if ever
there was a true life MacGyver this guy
was it we had the best pilots in the
business working for us and notice a
little air conditioner packs it’s about
a hundred degrees in the shade in
Houston where this picture was taken
Todd Allen is in the green shirt for our
left he did a lot of the firmware design
electronics design and dr. Lee Harrison
of SUNY Albany did a lot of the software
work on this and he’s an atmospheric
scientist and this is only part of the
team we really a team of about five or
six people but it really was a
distributed team we had the Navy we had
our team and right over the hill in
Massachusetts and Montague and we got to
a point where we really wanted to give
up this was a lot harder than we thought
and one of the takeaways is and this
quote is attributed to Edison often in
life you get stuck and you have to
remember if they
was easy someone else would have already
done this and you have to kind of enter
the beginning phase of the project with
Oh what could possibly go wrong because
if you don’t have that faith in your own
ability you’ll never get anywhere at the
same time you have to be a realist and
if you’re running out of gas running out
of money at a certain point you have to
you have no other choice but to give up
but it’s very important sometimes you
don’t realize how close you are and we
had a lot of problems the plane would
work great on the ground we’d get up to
60,000 feet and nothing worked
we’d go to 50,000 feet it would work and
you have to get up high enough to get
over the hurricane to fly safely so this
turned out to be weeks and then months
remotely working in the field trying to
get this to work you couldn’t really
simulate the environment and finally it
was like the layers of the onion you
peel back each layer
finally the sucker started working and
we got our first hurricane it turned out
the first hurricane was in the Atlantic
the second hurricane in 2015 was in the
Pacific the third hurricane was in Italy
and we were literally hopping on jet
liners going back and forth between
these forward bases that literally chase
storms now the plane has a limited fuel
range so it can only go so far so you
have to forward deploy the plane which
costs another hundred thousand dollars
so it’s a very risky game and the Navy
had to predict when the storm was going
to be five days in advance to
logistically allow NASA to get the b-57
into position so this is hurricane
Joaquin and these are four different
days this is sort of a mosaic so day one
is on the bottom
day four is on the top and each of those
dots is where we dropped one of our
sensors and we’re all flying from Warner
Robins Air Force Base in Georgia and
this was the Epiphany of on the first
day it turned out we were 12 hours after
the El Faro sank if you remember there
was a there was a ship that went back
and forth between Florida and Puerto
Rico and I had 33 souls on it in its
sank and it sank because the forecast
was wrong the captain looked at the NOAA
forecast and he made a bet and the bet
didn’t pay off and a lot of those 33
people were from New England they went
to mass maritime or Maine Maritime
Academy
it’s very sad and we were watching this
on the news while we were in our little
control bunker at Warner Robins and we
had no idea but we were right over it at
one point a few hours afterwards so we
are we were over sampling the storm no
storm has ever been sampled like this up
until this point it was very exciting
but it was kind of a sobering moment
because the real pain hit home that
we’re doing this for a reason it turns
out that 50% of our population lives
within 50 miles of a coastline so it’s
very likely that someone you know will
be affected in their lifetime by one of
these storms and it’s not it’s not a
tornado in the terms of it’s a tight
mess in a certain town it’ll wipe out
entire cities so it’s just bound to
happen it happened in New Orleans it’s
bound to happen again but this was a
real sort of human aspect that hit us so
by the way that’s the eye of Hurricane
Joaquin taken from the camera under the
plane and I showed you how tiny it was
so this was kind of a Frankenstein hike
storm it was a very tight I very very
intense and the next hurricane happened
in the Pacific this was the last one and
this is where it got kind of exciting
cuz the Navy almost didn’t go
we had already chased three storms we
were running low on supplies they were
running low on money and they said well
maybe we’ll we’ll keep some dry powder
for next year we’ll go in 2016 well
there was one scientist who pounded his
fist on the table said these are the
ideal conditions this is the storm we’ve
been waiting for and there was no storm
so this is five days ahead of Patricia
which is what you’re looking at track
this is October 21st to 24th in 2015 so
we get over the storm on the first day
because essentially they couldn’t shut
Russ up and we get there and there’s no
hurricane and we’re all looking at each
other like oh boy we just wasted a
hundred thousand dollars this is bad and
the first day we dropped 13 sensors and
we said well maybe we’re down here we
might as well wait for a second day the
second day was a category one the third
day was a category five this thing
rapidly intensified to beat the band on
the fourth day it was off the charts it
was literally like a category seven
so this is a bird’s-eye view of the
sensors as we crossed it on the fourth
day and these are the trajectories the
Sonde’s took and it took a long time it
we did we didn’t do this instantly and
the science is still pretty young on
what I’m about to show you but what we
found is both hurricane Joaquin and
hurricane Patricia which turns out to be
the strongest hurricane ever observed in
the Western Hemisphere period end of
sentence this was a monster
by any measure Louis central pressure
200 not plus winds verified by a plane
at a thousand feet with a radar on it
and drops ons by the bucketload and it
was tilted like a twister like a
waterspout and it turns out that this
twist because we flew one way and we
came around in a couple hours flew the
other way orthogonal e we could measure
the rotational speed so just like the
Earth’s axis that’s tilted and it’s
processing the Earth’s causes the
seasons but the hurricane if that axis
tilt that axial tilt is in phase with
the Sun coming up remember the Sun is
pushing all this it’s all thermodynamic
it’s the heat input if it’s in phase
with the solar signal then it’s like
pushing a kid on a swing at the right
time the swing goes higher you push at
the right time the swing moves push at
the wrong time the swing stops we think
that this might be the key to unlocking
the intensity forecast to figure out why
for instance hurricane Matthew a couple
months ago became a superstorm all of a
sudden and before that it wasn’t very
powerful so again the days are young for
the science but it looks it looks
promising there’s a picture by the way
it’s sixty-two thousand feet taken by
the backseat navigator at hurricane
Patricia and those cloud towers are just
about flight altitude and there’s plane
Minh Tuan to fly it’s flying in a tenth
of an atmosphere it does not want to fly
through clouds at 62 thousand feet the
plane was coming back with salt on it
which nobody could believe how could
salt get up there this was a super
typhoon it was amazing by the way look
at how dark the sky is this is the
middle of the day this shows you how
little air there is up there because
there’s no Rayleigh scattering going on
which is what makes the sky blue so
where are we headed we’re headed towards
doing this with robots so the Navy has
about 68 Triton UAVs which is the top on
order and we’re gonna hopefully put
these robots in the back of them so we
can fly unmanned aerial vehicles about
26 people have died
surveilling hurricanes in the past 40 or
50 years it’s dangerous work it’s not
work for people it should be done by
robots but the lower left corner is I
think the real engineering solution it’s
kind of crazy to move a hundred and
fifty thousand pound airplane full of
people and jet fuel over a storm to drop
a 50 gram item think about form fit and
function it’s it’s crazy what we should
be doing is solar-powered drones that
sit up there for months powered by the
Sun and batteries and electricity and
you you Park him up there and they drop
the sensors on command so they start a
loiter up there and I think that’s the
future so that’s where we’re headed but
it’s uh here’s the four sequence days of
Patricia showing kind of a the flight
pattern it was exciting yet terrifying
to get over Patricia and it was
fulfilling in terms of we had
accomplished something but it was also a
great sacrifice and that’s a cautionary
tale that if you get so pulled into it
and this happens in the movie twister
that your family forgets where you are
what you’re doing there’s a sacrifice
involved and my family sacrificed quite
a bit and also my team’s families and
that was an unexpected result but
thankfully they they stood by me so it’s
a cautionary note dedicate your
something yourself to do something
important write down your goals and work
towards those goals don’t let anything
stop you thank you
[Applause] you