As Hurricane Patricia strengthened to become the strongest ever storm to hit the western hemisphere, researchers were still flying straight into it.
Footage captured a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) plane passing through the eye of the hurricane several times on Thursday and Friday, as wind speeds on the ground reached 200mph.
In one video, the camera can be seen shaking violently as the plane is surrounded by clouds and rain, before a brief few minutes of respite in the storm’s very centre, when the ground below can clearly be seen.
The windscreen is blanked out by rain and hail and at one point, the pilots are thrown out of their seats by the force of an updraft.
Joseph Klippel, a NOAA flight engineer, described the experience on Facebook, writing: “This most definitely is the most powerful storm ever in the western hemisphere.
“We were thumped so hard that our flight director’s keyboard flew off his station and all of his data was dumped.
“We circled for an hour afterwards as he reconstructed the penetration, made more difficult by the fact the we encountered record setting pressures and airspeeds. This is such a cool job!”
Colleague Lonnie Kregelka wrote that they recorded winds of up to 235 mph and pressure of 879 milibars - the lowest ever recorded in a hurricane.
They were travelling in one of the NOAA’s specially modified Lockheed Orions, called Miss Piggy, which is equipped to withstand adverse conditions and sustain large amounts of damage” while taking atmospheric measurements.
Hurricane Patricia weakened from its record-breaking strength as it hit western Mexico but it still dumped torrential rains that authorities warned could cause deadly floods and mudslides.
It made landfall on Friday in a sparsely-populated stretch of the country’s Pacific coast as a category five hurricane but there were no reports of fatalities or major damage as the storm moved over inland mountains.
Local television showed toppled trees and lampposts, mudslides and cars and buses being swept away by floodwaters, as a state of emergency was declared.
“The first reports confirm that the damage has been less than those expected from a hurricane of this magnitude,” President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Friday night, adding: “We cannot yet let our guard down.“
The storm formed suddenly on Tuesday and shocked meteorologists with its rapid growth.
Patricia weakened to a category two hurricane early on Saturday with maximum sustained winds of 100mph and was expected to dissipate to become a tropical storm later today.
Additional reporting by PA
