HURRICANE WATCH
Saturday, September 12th, 2009Twenty years ago…
On September 11, 1989, Tropical Depression Eight continued to grow more organized, building a large region of heavy thunderstorms near its center. Two hooking spiral bands formed, prompting the National Hurricane Center to upgrade the depression to a tropical storm in their 11 am advisory. The new storm’s name: Hugo. Tropical Storm Hugo continued to trek westward across the open Atlantic at 20 mph, still four days from the Lesser Antilles Islands.
That day at NOAA’s Miami-based Office of Aircraft Operations–the hurricane hunting division of NOAA–we joked about the fearsome new storm with the same name as the director of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Marine Laboratory (AOML), Hugo Bezdek. AOML housed the offices of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, whose scientists would decide whether or not our hurricane hunting group would intercept the new storm once it got close enough to the Lesser Antilles Islands. Even if Hugo was a dud, we figured we’d be flying the storm for sure, since it shared the same first name as the big boss of the hurricane research scientists.
After work that evening, I celebrated my 29th birthday by biking through the sun-dappled shaded streets of Coconut Grove. As I stopped to watch a perfect tropical fuchsia-red sunset, my thoughts roamed out over the eastern horizon. What kind of birthday present had the weather gods delivered me today? I was first on the list of flight meteorologists that would deploy to meet Hugo, should we fly the storm…Jeff Masters (read his blog here)
