On October 27, 1998, Hurricane Research Division scientists made an historic flight into Hurricane Mitch as it loitered off the Honduran coast while it was still a Category Five storm. Mitch had formed five days earlier in the western Caribbean Sea and had moved slowly westward, paralleling the Honduran coast as it intensified.
The flight reached the storm a day after it peaked in intensity, but the maximum sustained winds still exceeded 140 knots (160 mph). Numerous GPS dropwindsondes were released near the eye of the hurricane providing the first multiple, detailed wind profiles of the inner core of a major hurricane.
Some of the research generated by this data include:
- Kepert, Jeffrey D., 2006: Observed Boundary Layer Wind Structure and Balance in the Hurricane Core. Part II: Hurricane Mitch. J. Atmos. Sci., 63, 2194–2211.
- Barnes, Gary M., 2008: Atypical Thermodynamic Profiles in Hurricanes. Mon. Wea. Rev., 136, 631–643.
- Powell, Mark D., Eric W. Uhlhorn, Jeffrey D. Kepert, 2009: Estimating Maximum Surface Winds from Hurricane Reconnaissance Measurements. Wea. Forecasting, 24, 868–883.
A day later, a weakened Mitch came ashore in Honduras as a Category One hurricane, but its torrential rains brought terrible flash flooding to Central America, killing over 19,000 people, causing over $6 billion in damage, and ruining Honduran infrastructure. Presidente Carlos Roberto Flores claimed that Mitch set his country back fifty years in progress.