Every morning before sunrise we stepped out on the tarmac. The temperature was already on the rise and the humidity was heading towards 100%. The GRIP team boarded NASAs DC-8 aircraft and headed towards a newly forming tropical storm. With the 8 experiments on board we hoped to get critical data that would help in the forecasting and early warning of hurricanes. At noon that day we arrived at the lead edge of the storm, the turbulence set in and we strapped in to complete our mission. As the Dropsonde Scientist, I was positioned at the back of the plane with a computer screen to my right in a seat that straddled a large tube that pierced the belly of the plane. The pilots would synchronise our flight path to intersect with two other aircrafts at different altitudes. On the pilots mark I opened the tube and released the dropsonde. I would then watch the screen as the realtime data appeared logging the vertical profile of the storm. The pilot would ver left and this would continue into late evening. Over the course of that hurricane season I flew over half a million of the bumpiest kilometres you could imagine.