As destructive hurricane Laura made its way up from the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday and Thursday, players were recently released Microsoft Flight Simulator realized that they could fly directly through a digital version of the massive storm through the live simulation of the weather.
It is an inwardly impressive and impressive face. To get a clear look at a real-time approximation of Laura without any of the dangers involved in being near the storm is a unique experience.
As compared to how it is in fact flying through a hurricane, here is a video of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pilot Nick Underwood.
Kermit (# NOAA42) flew through Hurricane #Laura FIVE times today. Here is a timeline of our second passing through the beginning for our third.
A pass in and out of a hurricane is called a “penetration” as a “penny”. Five pennies takes my career total to 61 today.#FlyNOAA pic.twitter.com/IqajXPbosQ
– Tropical Nick Underwood (@TheAstroNick) August 26, 2020
Underwood flies through hurricanes to collect data that is used to better inform forecasters and improve the accuracy of their predictions, allowing forecasters to warn people on the path of hurricanes like Laura earlier.
While flying through storms, hurricane fighters, as these pilots are known, deploy devices, called drop probes, that collect data such as temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind speed and direction, and send this information back to the aircraft before it touch water. Pilots are also penetrating the eyes of hurricanes, as getting the location of the center of the eye is especially important information for forecasters plotting the path of hurricanes, according to HurricaneHunters.com.
While Flight Simulator pilots are not as vital to understanding hurricanes as pilots sailing through the real thing, the game pilots can see Laura differently who can help show the scale of the storm that grew from a category 3 in a Category 4 before making attacks in eastern Texas and western Louisiana.
Flight Simulator pilots also have an aesthetic advantage of viewing the undulating cloud formations through a third-party view that is not affected by things like rain and high wind currents.
Of course, it’s the weather that is represented in Microsoft Flight Simulator is not exactly perfect. In his own flight through the storm, Washington Post reporter Gene Park found it to be relatively calm, noting that the clouds were not turning as in a real hurricane.
Mar Flight Simulator still does an impressive job with its weather system. The simulated weather system is being developed in collaboration with Meteoblue, a company that measures weather data around the world and can reconstruct patterns around the world.
In front of Flight Simulator specifically, Meteoblue co-founder Mathias D. Muller explained in a video that they divide the world into 250 million relatively small boxes including 60 vertical layers up to the stratosphere, each with its own temperature, pressure, wind speed and precipitation, Al those data are stitched together with satellite image data from Bing maps to create realistic weather patterns.
