Kelly Ryan-Poterjoy is a senior research
associate at the Hurricane Research Division
in NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory
in Miami, Florida. Kelly actively participates
in the annual Hurricane Field Program,
including the development and implementation
of observing experiments,
the preparation of deployments into targeted,
tropical cyclones,
and the operation of aircraft instruments in the field.
She specializes in UAS Coyote
and Airborne Doppler Wind Lidar measurements,
which I'm sure she can explain,
and processes dropsonde and radar observations in real time.
A difficult feat, I imagine.
Her primary research interests include
refining aircraft reconnaissance methods for tropical cyclones,
hurricane boundary layer
and cloud physics model verification, satellite
and radar remote sensing techniques,
and the evolution of tropical cyclone structure
as it relates to size and intensity changes.
Kelly received her bachelor's of science in physics,
and her master's of science in atmospheric science
from the University of Arizona. With that introduction, Kelly,
it is wonderful to welcome you here this evening.
You have the floor.
Thank you so much, Bruce.
Again, my name is Kelly Ryan-Poterjoy,
and today I will be talking to you
about flying into hurricanes, aka, hurricane hunting.
Before I begin, I wanted to go into a little bit more detail
about what I do in my current position.
As the bio kind of alluded to,
I actively participate in the annual Hurricane Field Program
that NOAA puts on each year.
I work with my colleagues to develop experiments
to test different hypotheses that we have about hurricanes,
and I also operate instruments
that collect data within hurricanes when we fly.
Outside the hurricane season,
though ‒ that's about half the year ‒
I study how to improve measurement techniques
using what are known as Observing System Simulation
Experiments, which, simply speaking,
is like a video game of collecting data.
Beyond my actual research, my colleagues
and I communicate our results _____
[inaudible due to audio
[distortion] in order to improve prediction
and the understanding of hurricanes themselves.
Just a brief outline for today,
so you know what you're getting yourself into.
We're going to go through a little history
of hurricane hunting,
and that will lead us into present-day hurricane hunters
and what we do; the motivation, of course,
for why we're hurricane hunting;
why is it so important to collect these measurements.
What do we actually know about hurricanes?
What have we learned over the years,
and what do we need to know? What are our gaps in knowledge?
Then, finally, I'll be talking about real deployments
in NOAA's Hurricane Field Program,
where we set up our experiments and we go out into the field,
and we fly into hurricanes and collect data,
and then what we use that data for.
As we start the history of hurricane hunting,
I'm bringing up my first poll question.
I find it pretty interesting, so I'll go ahead
and give Bruce the floor for the poll question.
Thanks, everyone. Here is the first poll question.
Please click directly on your screen.
For those of you who may be using tablets
or may be viewing this on a different kind of mobile device,
especially if it's a Mac device, my apologies.
This does not work quite as well.
But, otherwise, please do your best
and select your first choice. Some folks pointed out
that I did have the date of the book club incorrect.
I apologize for that.
The actual date was going to be Monday, March 26th.
Right now, we've got a lot of people voting.
Let's just take another moment.
Okay, so we've got most people voting.
We're just going to leave it on for another few seconds.
All right, our polls are closed
and we will be sharing the results now.
Can you see these results, Kelly?
Yes, I can _____
[inaudible due to audio
[(distortion] a)
1972 was the leader in the poll today,
and 1943 was a pretty close second,
but I regret to inform you that the actual date was 1935.
I find this particularly interesting,
and I'll explain why when I get to the next slide.
Okay.
In 1935, the first planned hurricane flight
was actually done by a guy by the name of Leonard Povey,
and he circumnavigated what was later known
to be the Labor Day Hurricane,
which devastated the Florida Keys.
The reason that this is so interesting
is that it's actually only recently found to be true.
In the research that was required for a book
that a guy by the name of Willie Drye
wrote called Storm of the Century,
he discovered that this man was actually the first person
to do a planned hurricane flight.
_____ [inaudible due to audio
[distortion] 1943, which is typically the known first flight
that was planned for a hurricane mission,
and this was done by a guy whose name is Colonel Duckworth.
He flew into the eye of a hurricane on a dare,
nonetheless,
and collected the first airborne hurricane data.
He is actually sometimes known
as the father of instrument flights.
As these flights kept on going and going,
the U.S. Air Force
began intentionally flying into hurricanes.
They saw the data that was being collected
was markedly improving the ability
to prepare for impacts on the coast,
and so for the next few decades, the air force, the navy,
and the army shared hurricane flight duties.
Finally, in 1975, NOAA obtained two WP-3D Orion aircraft ‒
those are known as P-3s ‒
and they began annual missions into hurricanes.
In the early 1990s,
those P-3 planes were referred to as Kermit and Miss Piggy ‒
yes, you heard me right, from the Muppets ‒
and this was done specifically to catch the public's eye,
to give light to what's really been the main source
of improvement in hurricane prediction.
In 1996, finally, NOAA obtained the Gulfstream IV,
or G-IV aircraft, to sample the nearby environment.
This plane is called Gonzo, which obviously makes sense.
Throughout the 20th century, there were a few close calls,
but only one hurricane mission ended badly,
and this was in Hurricane Janet in 1955, very early on.
Unfortunately, the navy plane was not found,
nor were any of the crew members onboard.
But, if these close-call danger flights
that are particularly influential
in the safety protocol _____
[inaudible due to audio distortion].
Today, there are two groups
that conduct annual hurricane missions.
One of those is the U.S. Air Force.
They've been doing it for decades now.
While they deploy their hurricane aircraft,
their C-130s for all hurricanes in the Eastern Pacific
and the Atlantic oceans, their main purpose
is to determine simply the center location
and the intensity of a given storm.
This is known as reconnaissance.
NOAA, by contrast, deploys for a specific hurricane in, again,
the Eastern Pacific and Atlantic oceans
that may threaten to make landfall
or maybe are of particular interest to scientific research.
The main purpose of these missions
is to collect measurements that are important for not
only understanding hurricane phenomenon
but also for computational weather models,
for numerical weather models that rely on this data
in order to be as realistic as possible.
We're narrowing in on the NOAA Hurricane Hunters aircraft,
and there are two different types.
You can see them both here, actually.
The one on the top,
which is actually flying at the same level
but a little farther away, is the P-3 Orion.
This is the aircraft that flies directly into the hurricane
at just 10,000 feet. It's really low.
You can see the ocean, you can see the waves.
If you're in the eye, you can see from the ocean to the sky.
It's really beautiful.
We actually have two of those aircraft.
The aircraft in the foreground is our G‑IV,
and, like I had mentioned earlier,
flies around the hurricane,
and sometimes above if it's weak enough,
at around maybe 40,000 feet.
This is meant to capture what type of environment
the hurricane may be tracking into or currently resides in.
On our NOAA P-3 aircraft,
we have a bunch of different instruments.
We have a bunch of instruments on either aircraft.
I'm going to focus on the aircraft
that flies directly into the hurricane.
That's the one I have experience in operating instruments
and conducting experiments with.
We have tons of different instruments on this plane.
On the bottom right,
you see an image of an airplane with a few cones,
and each of those cones represents
a different type of radar that we have on the aircraft.
We also have instruments that we release from the plane,
so we take these things called dropsondes,
which you see on the left-hand side,
and we release them from the belly of the plane
and allow them to drop all the way to the ocean.
This instrument collects direct measurements of the atmosphere
as it falls and until it splashes into the ocean.
We also have lots of different types of instruments.
Another one is a drone that we have called the UAS Coyote,
which was mentioned earlier, and that's there in the middle,
but we have a bunch of different instruments
that it would take a long time to go through.
But, in a nutshell, we collect all sorts of
atmospheric condition measurements,
including temperature, pressure, moisture,
wind, precipitation, et cetera.
All of these are important for understanding hurricanes
and for getting the models to predict them correctly.
After all these years of flying into hurricanes,
why is it that we still do it?
It couldn't just be because it's thrilling, right?
There is actually a purpose.
The main purpose is that of impact,
how much that data actually impacts
the ability for hurricanes to be predicted.
With that, I will go to my second poll question.
Bruce, you can go ahead and pull that up.
Great, so we're going to leave this for just about a moment.
Kelly, was there any particular direction
that you had for this question? They should select one?
Sure. I should have said this.
You can choose one or two or three,
or all of them for this question.
Oh, I see.
Well, they can only actually select one answer here, but ‒
Okay. Well, let's see which one is the dominant one.
The dominant one, very good. We'll leave this up
for just a moment to see what people's thoughts are.
Okay, we've got most people having voted
on their dominant impact when hurricanes make landfall,
so let's close the poll now. All right.
All right. _____ [inaudible due to audio
[distortion], and definitely it's a big impact,
but all of you are going to love this:
all of you are right, because all of those impacts
have the potential for occurring when hurricanes make landfall.
Storm surge is definitely one of the most historic ones,
but you can think of strong winds
and wind gusts from Hurricane Andrew,
heavy rainfall, severe weather and tornadoes.
Tornadoes can exist when hurricanes make landfall.
It's really just a whole big whammy of a punch.
With all these weather impacts,
they produce really devastating results on society
very often, unfortunately,
and we can just take a look at recent history.
In 2017, we had three major hurricanes make landfall.
Hurricane Harvey in Texas,
with 98 deaths and over $100 billion in damage.
Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico
and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and of course Hurricane Irma,
which impacted the United States heavily,
as well as the Caribbean,
so we have major society impacts from these weather disasters.
The numbers, the death toll and the cost of these hurricanes
are actually a big improvement from the mid 19th century,
due to aircraft technology and satellites.
But, nonetheless, minimizing the loss of life,
the property damage and economic impact remains really crucial,
and that's why we strive for improvements in prediction.
It allows the public to be as prepared as possible
so we can minimize the devastation.
_____ [inaudible due to audio
[distortion] can be quite difficult.
There are two things that prediction really depends on.
The first one is the forecasters.
The forecasters that we have have great experience.
They really know what they're doing,
and their experience can add another point of view
that a computational model simply cannot obtain yet.
At the same time, computer models,
which map out the atmosphere onto a grid,
such as the one that I've shown her on the right,
they use past and current information
to predict the most likely outcome.
You'll notice I said not only past information,
but current measurements.
We need to be able to measure the atmosphere,
and this is why NOAA monitors hurricanes so closely.
But, hurricanes are special, you see?
I know, coming from a hurricane scientist,
that's interesting, but they really are.
They exist over the ocean,
so there is notoriously few data.
Since _____ [inaudible due to audio
[distortion]
and satellites really can't see through clouds well,
so really only getting the upper atmosphere above the hurricane,
and this is precisely why flying into hurricanes
is still important today.
It's still crucial to get that data
that we would not otherwise have.
All right. We're going to shift gears here.
What do we actually know about hurricanes?
You'll probably notice on the upper left
is the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.
You probably know what this is. This categorizes hurricanes
based on the potential for destruction.
It's a rough guide for how destructive a hurricane
might be able to be.
We know that the typical hurricane season
is in the summertime.
The right-hand side is a graph of the frequency of hurricanes
averaged over 100 years.
You can see September is the peak of the hurricane season.
We also know there is a large range of sizes of hurricanes.
You can get a midget hurricane with a radius of only 50 miles,
and you can get huge hurricanes with a radius of 1,500 miles.
Judging by the Saffir-Simpson scale,
you probably gathered that the typical intensity range
for a hurricane is 75 to 200 miles an hour,
200 being the max that we've physically recorded.
Finally, we know that they occur in the tropics,
over the oceans, and in the subtropics,
between zero and 40 degrees latitude,
but not along the equator.
You can kind of see this in this plot here.
Now, what I have on this image are the tracks
for all hurricanes,
typhoons, and cyclones that we know of in the world.
You might be thinking, "Okay, I know what a hurricane is,
but I've heard of a typhoon and maybe a cyclone."
Well, all of these are the exact same thing.
They're all just different names for the generic _____
[inaudible due to audio distortion] as hurricanes.
People in the Western Pacific will note them as typhoon,
or, in the southern hemisphere, cyclone,
but you can see there is absolutely none
that form along the equator.
This third poll question is going to be a little tricky.
Why don't they form along the equator?
How interesting. It's suspect, isn't it?
All right, Bruce, you can go ahead and pull up that question.
Thank you.
We're going to see who amongst the attendees this evening
has had excellent Earth science training.
All right, we've got almost 80 percent of the attendees voting.
I'm just going to leave it open for another few moments.
Okay, let's see what people think.
I think a lot of people
had really great Earth science training.
(The correct answer is definitely c)
there is no Coriolis force there.
For those of you who don't know what the Coriolis force is,
it's an invisible force that occurs on a spinning body,
on a rotating body like the Earth,
and it deflects winds
due to the conservation of angular momentum,
which is a product of having the spinning nature of a body.
Simply, without it, there is no rotation,
so you don't get any hurricane.
What else do we know about hurricanes?
Well, _____ [inaudible due to audio
[distortion] hurricane looks something like this,
and we know this mainly due to flights.
Most of the time,
when hurricanes come close enough to land
for the radars to pick up information,
it's already decaying due to effects from land.
We know that hurricanes are a low-pressure system.
Air rushes to the center near the surface
and rises due to instability or buoyancy in the air,
how easily something can ascend upward,
and then it rotates due to the Coriolis force.
Where do hurricanes get all this energy to function?
The energy mainly comes from the ocean.
The higher ocean temperatures create the environment
for a higher potential of the transfer of energy.
At this point, I'm sure some of you might be thinking,
"Hmm, warmer ocean temperatures, climate change _____
[inaudible due to audio distortion] more hurricanes."
But, actually, it's a bit more complicated than that,
and there actually is no scientific consensus
on the impact to hurricane strength or frequency.
For now, that will just have to be a question that we have.
Beyond the anatomy, we also know that hurricanes
interact with the environment around them.
Hurricanes are steered by the wind
flow around ridges and troughs,
also known as high and low-pressure regions.
These regions may track the hurricane
into unfavorable or more favorable conditions.
In the unfavorable conditions category,
we know from physics that dry air tends to decrease buoyancy,
and I had mentioned earlier that in order to get rising motion,
we need to have a buoyant atmosphere,
and we also know that vertical wind shear,
which is the difference in wind _____
[inaudible due to audio distortion]
to the upper atmosphere, the difference between those,
and that difference prevents the vertical alignment
of a hurricane. To the right of the slide,
you'll see a satellite image with a hurricane.
You can see the low-level circulation.
You can see a lot of upper-level clouds off
to the northeast of that.
That's due to this wind shear problem
that the hurricane has encountered.
The reason that this is an issue
is that the storm's ability to extract energy from the ocean
is focused over a larger area,
as opposed to a vertically-stacked hurricane
can more efficiently take energy from the ocean.
We know a lot about hurricanes, it's really great,
but we do have major gaps in knowledge.
If we didn't, we would be able to predict them
a little bit better, at least further out in advance.
These aircraft do a really good job of collecting data
in places that we wouldn't normally get data,
but these gaps,
and understanding these gaps in the regions
that we measure the atmosphere are the reasons why we fly.
Those data are important for our atmospheric model.
In understanding what major gaps in knowledge
we have about hurricanes,
we come up with lists of questions
that we want to answer.
Some examples are here at the bottom.
How does mid-level moisture affect hurricanes,
i.e., how does the difference in buoyancy
affect how a hurricane evolves,
or what role does vertical wind shear play
in the rapid intensification of hurricanes,
or how quickly hurricanes can intensify over time?
These questions are what we use to create experiments
for our Hurricane Field Program, for flying into hurricanes.
We don't just go in there collecting _____
[inaudible due to audio
[distortion] scientific method to answer specific questions
that we have about hurricanes.
All of these goals aim to collect observations
for three main purposes.
The goals listed here
include model initialization and evaluation,
or how well are our models doing,
and how realistic are they?
Also, what are the data that we need
to put into the models to improve the forecasts?
The second goal is to collect observations
that are useful in developing new instruments
and observing strategies ‒ how are we collecting data,
and what are the types of data
that we need to fill in the gaps in knowledge that we have?
Finally, to improve the understanding
of how hurricanes evolve,
what are the atmospheric processes
that dictate whether a hurricane intensifies or dissipates?
Before the season starts,
we develop these mission experiments.
We determine which questions we have that we want to answer.
Each of these mission experiments determines
the best ways to collect data
needed to answer these questions.
In other words, when you create a mission experiment,
you want to be able to optimize
the way you're using the aircraft,
which instruments you want to use
and how in order to collect the data
that will help you answer that question.
An example of something you would put in the mission
experiment is on the bottom-left corner here.
It's a flight pattern, and it's a typical flight pattern
we fly when we want to use tail Doppler radar data
in our hurricane models in order to improve the forecast.
There are a bunch of different flight patterns you can use,
a bunch of different instruments you can use,
so you really just tailor what you want in the mission
towards the questions you want to answer.
Now, this all happens way
before the hurricane season even starts.
During the hurricane season, we do daily map discussions
and look at what the models are producing,
what are the forecasters saying,
what hurricanes might be a potential target
to answer some of these questions
we have in our mission experiments,
and do these targets lie within range
of the places we deploy from?
In the bottom middle image,
you'll see a couple of locations where we deploy from,
and rings around them. Those are our range rings,
so we can deploy from any one of those locations
to reach any potential target in the Atlantic, Caribbean,
or Gulf of Mexico.
We have a couple of other places, too.
We use, for example, the image on the right to determine ‒
in this example, I think it's four days out ‒
in four days what do the models say
the hurricane will look like,
or where do they say the hurricane will exist,
and so we use all of the information
we have at our disposal to make these decisions.
Finally, we coordinate the projects
with the National Hurricane Center
with the Environmental Modeling Center with the U.S. Air Force
in order to make sure that we get the data
that we need to improve the forecasts,
collect the data for scientific research,
and make sure no one is doing the same thing.
Once we have a target picked out
and our hurricane is within range,
we have a few scientists and some crew members deploy
to any of the locations that we have available to us.
There is an airborne crew and a ground crew,
and the typical deployment includes missions
every 12 hours,
where each mission lasts 8 to 10 hours at a time.
We do this for as long as the hurricane is alive
and hasn't made landfall,
so it can last two, three days, it can last ten days,
it really just depends on the situation.
Each mission includes a brief at the beginning, safety concerns,
"What is the mission goal for this particular flight,
and how are we going to make sure these goals are achieved?"
They also include a debrief at the end,
"What did we collect?
What did we do well during this mission?
What kind of needs improvement?"
Each mission requires a bunch of different types of people,
so not only scientists are there,
and pilots, as you would imagine,
but also navigators, electrical engineers,
a suite of different people that are required
to make these missions happen.
For our fourth and final poll question,
how many airborne crew members
are there on the P-3 aircraft during a typical mission?
I'll go ahead and give that to Bruce.
Thanks, Kelly. Remind me again, Kelly,
about what is the size of a P-3 aircraft?
That is a great question. Give me one moment.
It's about the size of a cargo plane,
for those of you who know military planes.
It's a pretty big plane.
Okay. Very good.
Well, let's see what people's guesses are here.
Kelly, just to remind me. It's a pretty active situation
when you're actually up in the plane engaging in research.
Oh, absolutely.
You are constantly looking at the different instruments
that are collecting data,
seeing a live stream of what data you're collecting,
understanding your situational awareness,
where are you on the hurricane,
anything interesting that might happen,
and also being aware that there might be unexpected turbulence,
or looking out for potential dangers
that everybody who flies has the information
of during their safety training,
so it's definitely in the moment.
Right. Okay.
Well, listen, I think we've got most of our votes in,
and here's what we've got.
All right. The leading answer by a hair
is 12 to 15 crew members, and that is absolutely correct.
Are you guys looking it up online?
Yeah, there are usually 12 to 15 crew members
during each mission, sometimes more when there's
a really high-profile hurricane event and we fly,
and maybe news crews want to get on or some politicians,
people like that, but typically 12 to 15:
three pilots, a navigator _____
[inaudible due to audio
[distortion] engineers to make sure
everything goes according to plan,
so it's really a cooperative effort.
A lot of people have specific duties on the aircraft.
If they don't follow through with those duties,
the mission could be compromised.
Finally, after a typical deployment,
we do a debrief of all of the missions
for each particular hurricane.
We will review the evolution of the hurricane
that we just collected data in. What was it doing?
Was it steady _____ the whole time?
Did it go through an eyewall replacement cycle?
Did it do something interesting that is worth noting?
What data did we collect,
and how are we going to use that?
What are the data going to be used for,
for research, for example?
What were they used for in the models?
Which data were more important? We also show images of the data
or interesting things that we found.
Examples of this are this bottom-left image,
which is a bunch of measurements at flight level for the wind,
where the brighter pink colors are the higher wind values.
This was for Hurricane Matthew back in 2016,
and then on the right is a picture
that I actually took of the inside
of the eye of Hurricane Matthew
during the exact time you see portrayed on the left.
These are the types of things that we would go into
during the debrief of these missions
to make sure that our missions were completed,
or maybe to develop different modules
for the next season of what we could do better
or an additional question
that came from the data that we collected.
I'm just going to leave it there because I figured there _____
[inaudible due to audio distortion]
image of the eyewall from Hurricane Katrina.
I did not take this picture,
I was a little young at the time,
but thank you so much for calling in and listening.
I will take any questions or comments that you might have.
We have compiled a number of additional education resources,
for those of you who are tuned in this evening,
which are really quite excellent,
both for your own professional development
as well as for using in classrooms.
NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations
has a terrific hurricane hunters page
for additional information about the planes,
the operations, and the individuals
that do this essential work. There are some terrific videos
that the NOAA Ocean Today website has.
If you have not gone to the NOAA Ocean Today website,
I really urge you to do so. There are terrific videos.
They're short, very suitable for classrooms,
and a lot of them have been also translated into Spanish.
I would also like to mention the NOAA
Office of Education Hurricane Resources collection.
Very, very useful, as well as NOAA's National
Weather Service Jetstream Online Weather School.
There is an entire unit that focuses on tropical weather,
where you can actually go in
and see a lot of this information in detail,
and understand sort of step
by step the development and progression
and impact of hurricanes, and tornadoes,
and lots of other things.
Finally, for those of you who might be interested,
there is a unit from an organization called MetEd,
and it's called Hurricane Strike!
A hurricane science and safety learning module.
If you click on this link or you go to this link,
one thing that you'll notice is that you'll have to sign in,
just like with your e-mail and a password.
It is completely free, though, and once you've signed in,
it will remember your information
and there are, I think,
something on the order of 100 or so different,
really terrific units that focus on weather,
that focus on climate change impact,
so a lot of really good things to use.
I just want to let you know,
this is a really terrific picture.
Kelly, do you want to tell us what this is a picture of?
Sure. This is a picture of the eyewall of Hurricane Katrina.
This is back in 2005, so it was a really, really big storm.
Kelly, are you looking at my screen now?
I can't actually see your screen right now.
Oh, you can't?
Gosh, I don't know why you can't see that.
I thought I was ‒
That's okay. ‒ showing my screen.
I'm actually showing a photo of the mission emblems
that are painted on the side of Miss Piggy.
Oh _____
[inaudible due to audio distortion] ‒
_____ [inaudible due to audio distortion] ‒
_____ [inaudible due to audio
[distortion] yes, so I can't see your picture
but I do know the aircraft very well.
Each time that the aircraft go into a hurricane,
whether that's one in the Atlantic or the Pacific,
or even remote missions in the Western Pacific
or in the Indian Ocean, for example,
if there are any in the future, then those specific missions,
those deployments get put onto the plane
sort of as a reminder of the history
that this particular plane has endured through.
Yeah, and this particular image, if you want to count,
it shows off badges from 80 different tropical cyclones
in 36 different countries and territories
where Miss Piggy has flown missions, which is pretty cool.
If you ever have the opportunity to see this,
this is very neat. Remind us again.
We've got Miss Piggy, we've got Kermit,
but isn't there one plane called Gonzo?
There is a plane called Gonzo.
Kermit and Miss Piggy are our first hurricane hunter aircraft,
NOAA's first, and those are the two planes
that go directly into the hurricanes.
But, in 1996, NOAA acquired another aircraft.
This is the G-IV aircraft,
and that's the one we call Gonzo,
and Gonzo samples the environment around a hurricane.
I found out some pretty interesting information,
why they call it Gonzo.
Do you want to share that? _____
[inaudible due to background noise].
Pardon?
What did you find?
That apparently my understanding
is that the nose cone of the aircraft
had to be altered in order to take special equipment inside,
and because of this sort of interesting
and sort of altered shape that had this sort of elongated,
sort of downward-facing nose cone,
that they named it Gonzo.
That's absolutely right.
Boy. Cool.
Maintaining, of course, the theme of the Muppets.
Right, that's integral.
Yes.
Well, this is terrific. You know what?
We got a lot of really good questions here.
Kelly, I have a question.
Do you have any questions that you would like to pose
to the attendees this evening, if anybody wants to write in?
Questions? I wasn't prepared for questions to ask them.
I guess really ask yourself what kind of impacts hurricanes
might have on you personally. You might live far away
but maybe you have family in other places,
or we might be in a situation similar to Hurricane Harvey,
where very important companies that make specific materials
had to be shut down for a week or two.
If they're the main source of that particular material,
that's going to affect not only the people of Houston,
for example, but our whole country.
Just think to yourself, "Hmm, I might be in Montana,
but I bet there is a way that hurricanes impact me somehow,"
so just think about that. If you are near the coast,
pay attention to hurricane watches and warnings
because being prepared can save your life,
and it can also minimize any damage you might have.
Well, thanks for that. I'll tell you, with that,
I think that I'm going to stop our recording in just a moment.
I would like to say thank you so much, Kelly,
for joining us this evening.
I know that you had some injuries over the weekend
but you toughed it out.
I know this was important to you,
and we had a lot of people join us this evening
that you shared your message with,
and I'm so pleased that you took the time this evening to join us
and to just share your expertise
and this information with all of the educators
who came here this evening, so thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me.
I love sharing the information I have,
the passion I have for my job and for hurricanes.
Hopefully, this can inspire someone,
so I'm very, very happy to be talking today,
so thank you, again.
I'm going to stop the recording now
and say good evening to everyone,
and look forward to having you join us at future distance
learning activities that we have with NOAA Planet Stewards,
as well as face-to-face events
that we're going to be having at NSTA
as well as a number of workshops
that we're going to be doing this spring and this summer,
so thanks very much, everyone. I hope that you all ‒