Page 23 - Steering Currents News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Eye. paul flaherty joins us now. paul, man, i understand we are catching you at 45,000 feet above irma. what are the conditions? >> good morning. i'm up here about 45,000 feet just south of cuba, right around guantanamo bay. we just finished going around the outside of the storm. i'm on the jet today, so i'm on the high flying plane collecting data for the steering currents to go into the model so we can narrow down this forecast. we have a plane in the storm and one just outside. what we're seeing is this is a very healthy, very strong storm. i think we all expected to see that today. we're a...

This is from hurricane hunters flying through the eye of the hurricane. joining us now from 45,000 feet is noaa hurricane hunter flight director paul harris. paul, can you hear us? >> yes, i can. >> what do you learn from being in the center of this particular storm? >> we have airplanes both in the center and also outside of the storm -- i'm on the aircraft outside of the storm right now. we're really focusing on understanding what the steering currents are going to do with this storm. as you can see, it's a bit of a nightmare right now for a lot of people on the ground. we want to make sure ...

How much af monster this storm is? >> well the data we're collecting on the aircraft i'm frid flying on is the gulf stream 4, the outskirts of the storm in order to collect data regarding the steering currents. the data we collect now won't be really known to us until the 12 z model occurs which is really happening now. we'll get that information out in about two to three hours. >> the eye wall. over the last day, any of the measure. s you've seen tell you anything about the strength, the tightness of the eye wall? >> well, tell you this. we just see the eye wall still a little bit. it looked ...

Is ready to go if needed even though we see the general path shift a little bit to the east, we are still going to be prepared. we want everyone in florida and everyone up through the carolinas to be prepared. if you don't prepare now, you won't have time when we know you have to go. >> fair point. what you're seeing in that storm in terms of steering currents leads you believe there's still a good chance it hits the florida peninsula? >> well, it has a good chance. there's a lot of probabilities in play here. the models are starting to agree more and hopefully as we fly we can collect more da...

If you live in the keys, you know to heed those warnings. how concerned are you that folks aren't going to heed some of these warnings if they're on the mainland of florida? >> there aren't many americans that have ever experienced storm surge from a major hurricane and the ones that stick around to figure out what it's like typically get killed. you know, the bottom line is storm surge is the unfor giving hazard. it's the main reason we ask people to evacuate or local governments and state governments ask people to evacuate. storm surge has the highest potential to kill the most amount of peo...