From the Vault: NOAA Hurricane Hunters - Laboratories in the Sky

As the 2025 hurricane season ramps up, we are bringing back this fan favorite from last year. This month marks the 64th anniversary of when Hurricane Carla battered the coast of Texas, instantly becoming one of the most intense and damaging hurricanes recorded in the state. But as houses and ships were battened down and residents fled the storm, some individuals with the Weather Bureau did the unthinkable: they strapped themselves into the cockpit of an airplane and flew directly into the eye of the storm! It started as a bar bet between pilots and became the standard procedure for observing and measuring hurricanes to provide life-saving data for researchers on the ground. Join me this week as I interview Daniel Tyson and Jonathan Shannon from NOAA to talk about what it’s like to fly into a hurricane and how technology has evolved since Hurricane Carla!