How do you track an atmospheric river? Climb aboard this highflying reconnaissance jet

Marty Ralph, center, watches as meteorologists Rich Henning, left, and Sofia de Solo track data while flying above an atmospheric river over the Pacific Ocean. “We are doing reconnaissance to measure these storms, and precisely get the data into the weather prediction models.” Meteorologist Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, looks out the window after flying to an atmospheric river northeast of Hawaii on a NOAA reconnaissance flight. So it’s a pretty classic atmospheric river.” Meteorologists Sofia de Solo and Rich Henning look at a map showing their path toward an atmospheric river as they set out on a NOAA reconnaissance flight. “And we’ve just recently, in the last 10 or 15 years, figured out really how to look for them, how to measure them best and how to characterize them.” The science of atmospheric rivers has come a long way since Ralph and his colleagues published a 2004 study drawing on data from satellites and reconnaissance flights. In 1998, scientists published a groundbreaking paper detailing the “moisture fluxes from atmospheric rivers.” Ralph said when he read the research, “that was a lightbulb going off for me.” That year, Ralph had begun flying to storms aboard NOAA planes during a powerful El Niño event.