Amazing video of hurricane hunters flying into Hurricane Patricia

Hurricane Patricia slammed into the coast of western Mexican state of Jalisco last Friday, packing sustained winds estimated at 165mph.

Prior to landfall, the category five storm had already taken the crown of the most intense hurricane in the western hemisphere.

With a measured central pressure of 879mb and sustained winds of 200mph, it beat the previous sustained winds record of 190mph set by Hurricane Allen in 1980.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami described Hurricane Patricia as “potentially catastrophic” with extreme concern for the areas that it would hit.

However, thankfully, the hurricane made landfall in a sparsely populated area, away from the densely populated centres of Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta, meaning that the impact was less than feared.

Inside Hurricane Patricia

As part of process to monitor storms to predict where they are heading and also to develop a better understanding, NOAA – the US National Weather Service – flies planes into hurricanes to take measurements.

The video below was posted by Lonnie Kregelka on Facebook, who is a member of the NOAA aircrew that flew into Hurricane Patricia on Friday, before it made landfall in Mexico.

You can see right from the start of the video that there is some turbulence as the plane encounter the updrafts – areas of rapidly rising air – in the wall of the hurricane.

However, the extreme turbulence begins around 1:20 into the video, as they enter the eye wall – the narrow zone around the centre of the storm where the strongest, most damaging winds are located.

Soon after at 1:40, there’s an abrupt change to calm as the plane enters the clear, cloudless eye of the storm, where there is little to no wind at all.

As the camera pans around at 1:45, you can see the billowing, angry clouds of the eye wall of the hurricane behind them.

After a few minutes at 3:00, they enter the eye wall on the other side of Hurricane Patricia and the extreme turbulence, lashing rain and hail return.

The eye of the hurricane was a mere few miles across, which is why it only took a few minutes to cross it.

Whilst commercial aircraft would avoid flying into or close to hurricanes, these specially adapted scientific planes are equipped to do so.

Measurements taken inside Hurricane Patricia, along with satellite images from space, will no doubt be studied carefully to gain a better understanding of such powerful storms.

Image and video: Lonnie Kregelka