NOAA El Niño Rapid Response

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HONOLULU, HI - FRIDAY, JANUARY 29: Alan S. Goldstein, Chief of the Science and Engineering Branch, talks with other crew members aboard the NOAA Gulfstream IV "Gonzo" before a mission near Kiritimati Island on January 29, 2016 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
To better understand El Nino, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has mobilized it's Earth System Research Laboratory's (ESRL) Physical Science Divison to Hawaii. The current major El Niño affecting the pacific and western areas of the Americas is an unprecedented scientific opportunity for NOAA's scientists to further our understanding and ability to predict extreme climate events and its impacts through research of the phenomena while it is currently ongoing.
So, Henry Fountain, a writer with The New York Times and I set out to spend some time with the crew that would be studying the heart of what is perhaps the strongest El Niño in a generation, where it's weather begins.

Henry and I met with the team at Castle & Cooke Avation, a private aviation service center where the NOAA team would be staging from. At first it was quite a tough assignment to shoot, a lot of what Henry would be writing about was the process of the mission, and some the of results that their findings might be reporting as they collected data. Quite the visually unintersting assignment, so I decided to hang back and be a fly on the wall, observing the crews do what they do best: Science.
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Flight Director Mike Holmes gestures gestures while discussing the flight path and potential obstacles the crew might encounter.
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Mr. Holmes points to a patch of weather that might prove troublesome during the pre-flight briefing.
There are two major teams that contribute to the field campaign: The flight crew and the science team. The science crew figures out what they want to study and how the best go about collecting that data, and the flight crew makes it happen, or advises against a certain course of action if they deem a course of action too difficult.
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Program manager Dr. Ryan Spackman leads the morning science team briefing, teleconferencing with colleagues at their offices in Boulder, Colorado.
The team is opertating multiple vehicles as part of the campaign in Hawaii until March. In that time, the Gulfstream G-IV – which is actually more accustomed to hunting hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean – is expected to make about 20 trips.
The trips take the flight crew and researchers to desolate stretch of tropical ocean where the northern and southern trade winds meet, south of the Hawaiian Islands.
On these trips Airborne Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System (AVAPS) or "dropsondes" are deployed from the Gulfstream some 45,000 feet in the air, and slowed by a small parachute, fall toward the water, transmitting wind speed and direction, humidity and other atmospheric data back to the plane continuously on it's descent to deep blue.
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Clockwise from Top Left: Flight Director Rich Henning holds a dropsonde. Dropsondes, ready for deployment. The Deployment tube, and the chute where the sonde will exit the plane into the plane's slipstream and float down to the ocean.
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The Times's Henry Fountain, getting a safety briefing, before take off on a mission last month.
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Flight crew members Brad Fritzler, Dave Cowan, Mike Holmes, and Ron Moyer prepare for the day's flight, plotting out their course on maps.
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Co-pilots Dave Cowarn, left, and Brad Fritzler, right perform a Before Starting Engines checklist aboard the G-IV "Gonzo".
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The Gulfstream IV "Gonzo" taxi's down towards the Honolulu International Airport reef runway on January 29, 2016 in Honolulu, Hawaii.