The 2007 hurricane season ended quietly on Friday without a tropical storm, disturbance or hurricane in sight. For all intents and purposes, the season really came to a close in late October when Hurricane Noel swept through the Caribbean and briefly threatened Florida.

The National Hurricane Center reports 14 storms formed this year, above the long-term average of 10 tropical storms. Still, most of the 14 were weak, short-live systems that were only a concern for shipping.

Only six hurricanes developed in 2007 with three, Dean, Felix and Humberto, making landfall. Dean and Felix reached rare category five status before slamming into Central America and Mexico. Humberto was a weak category one hurricane when it struck the southeast coast of Texas.

For the second consecutive year Florida was not hit by a tropical storm or hurricane. While Noel did get our hearts beating a little faster back in October, the storm’s biggest impact was significant beach erosion along the coastline.

Overall, folks in hurricane country along the United States coastline are more than happy with the 2007 hurricane season.

For the hurricane research community, however, 2007 will be remembered for the loss of two legends in tropical meteorology. Late last week, Herb Saffir, the man who helped create the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, died in his Miami home.

In early August, Dr. Robert Burpee, a past director of the National Hurricane Center and one of the top researchers in tropical meteorology, passed away in Miami following a long illness.

Of the two, Saffir is probably the better known thanks to the creation of his hurricane scale back in the late 1960’s. Working with Robert Simpson, the director of the hurricane center at the time, Saffir came up with a system to rank the destructive capability of a hurricane based on its wind speed and storm surge.

“Dividing hurricanes into categories was an idea whose time had come,” former hurricane specialist Mile Lawrence told the Miami Herald. “It was a wonderful way to collapse the information into a way that was easier to understand.''

Saffir also worked to strenghten building codes in South Florida and was instruemnetal in the implementation of a new state-wide building code considered the strongest in the nation.

“Driving around south Florida I can see the engineering work I have done,” Saffir told the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. “It’s there in the shape of buildings and bridges. It is there in the fact that the building code we use. I think I’ve left a little mark.”

There is no doubt among hurricane researchers that Dr. Robert Burpee also left “a little mark.” While he was director of the National Hurricane Center for two years from 1995 to 1997, it is in the research field that Burpee will be best remembered.

“Bob was one of those unsung heroes, a pioneer and scientist that helped shape the data we use today,” said Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Craig Fugate.

A veteran of more than 250 flights into hurricanes, Burpee was among the first who proposed using a jet to obtain environmental data around a hurricane. By sampling the atmosphere near the storm, forecasters had a much clearer sense of where the hurricane might be headed next. Max Mayfield, the former director of the hurricane center, says Burpee’s work added an additional “10 to 15 percent improvement in track forecasts.”

In 1995, Burpee helped formed the NOAA/FEMA Hurricane Liaison Team, which integrated emergency managers and hurricane forecasters to provide residents with important information. Burpee was part of countless research projects and the author of dozens of papers.

Both men’s contributions to hurricane research and safety will long be remembered as countless other top scientists build on the work of Herb Saffir and Bob Burpee.

It began as a dare, a bet among British and American pilots on July 27, 1943 as a hurricane was approaching the Texas Coast. It ended in history, as Colonel Joseph P. Duckworth became the first man to fly into a hurricane and return.

Duckworth actually flew into the hurricane twice that day, first with navigator Ralph O'Hair and a second time with weather officer William Jones-Burdick. In both cases, Duckworth's plane encountered severe turbulence and heavy rain before breaking into the storm's eye.

Within a few years, flights into hurricanes would become routine, an important source of information for hurricane forecasters. Today, the Hurricane Hunters, based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi fly dozens of missions each season.

Remarkably, flying an airplane into a hurricane is not as crazy as it sounds. Still, some missions are more challenging than others. Writing in the October issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Neal Dorst recounts several rough rides.

On September 9, 1971 Hurricane Edith was approaching the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. Hurricane Hunters encountered "turbulence so severe that the pilots temporarily lost control of the aircraft," writes Dorst. "By the time they regained control, they had lost 1,000 feet of altitude."

During a flight into Hurricane Allen in August of 1980 the turbulence was so bad that "the shaking knocked loose the life raft and convinced one scientist that hurricane research was not his future," writes Dorst.

Perhaps the most memorable experience in the history of the Hurricane Hunters came in September of 1989 with a flight into Hurricane Hugo. Severe turbulence in the eye wall disabled one of the plane's four engines. "The plane had to orbit in the eye, burning fuel, while climbing to a safe altitude," writes Dorst. The aircraft limped back to Barbados where it remained out of commission for the rest of the season.

Despite these stomach-turning examples, the Hurricane Hunters have an excellent safety record. Since the first reconnaissance missions began in the 1940's, four airplanes have been lost in storms, the last in 1974 when an Air Force WC-130 went down in the South China Sea.

When Hurricane Noel was headed towards the Canadian Maritimes a few weeks ago, another type of hurricane reconnaissance was unveiled. The National Weather Service and NASA made history as the first unmanned aircraft flew through the storm.

The five-foot-long Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) drone was launched from Wallops Island, Va., on a 20-hour-long mission through the hurricane. The pilotless aircraft is designed to fly into the eyewall of a hurricane at altitudes as low as 500 feet.

Scientists hope using unmanned aircraft will help fill a gap in near-surface data. The data have been hard to gather because of the safety risks of low-level flight.

"Unmanned flights at very low altitude are important since they give us unique insights and continuous observations in a region of the storm where the ocean's energy is directly transferred to the atmosphere just above. Attempting this type of research flight with our hurricane hunter aircraft would risk the lives of our crew and scientists," said Joe Cione, hurricane
researcher in Miami.

NOAA scientists are coordinating the unmanned flight to coincide with a manned Hurricane Hunter mission as well, providing a volume of data on Hurricane Noel from top to bottom. This level of information saturation is valuable to researchers, providing a more complete picture of storm structure and strength that becomes a valuable tool for meteorologists.

The hope, of course, is for better forecasts and increased warning time for coastal residents of an approaching hurricane.

Joe Duckworth became a legend when he accepted the challenge of British
pilots and flew into a hurricane. The first UAS flight a few weeks ago made
history, too, increasing our knowledge of tropical cyclones, the
greatest storm on Earth.