[Music]

It's a category 2 hurricane out here. Did the western eye come ashore? >> Yes, it did. It came right across right down over top of us. Right there. >> There is the hurricane landfall project truck. It's all set up, strapped down. We're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while. Standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe. We are getting into the eyew wall of Hurricane Jean right now. four came in on shore here along
the southeast coast of Florida. >> These little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that surge.

Hello again and welcome to another edition of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. I am your host Mark Sudith. Great to be back with you here again as we continue moving through the 2017
hurricane season. That being said, we
are up to about midepptember now and it's busy out there. We have Maria, we
have Lee, we have Jose, and then eventually once we get to October, we're going to have Nate. So, I'm going to cover those four tropical cyclones. A
lot uh to pack into this episode. It's going to be another long one. And uh yeah, it's really, really busy here on the heels of already a very busy time. We've had Harvey, we've had Irma, and um
you know, it's just not ending. Um, and
so let's just kind of start at the tail end here of what happened after Irma. Uh, we took a loss, uh, from the live
camera perspective. The terrestrial network going down, Verizon just, yo
know, it's not a hit on them. It's just the way it is. You know, the the hurricane won, we lost our Miami camera feed. We lost the Marathon/voda
cut camera feed and weather data. But at
least we archived the weather data. That was all saved on the computer. But um and then we lost uh Marco Island. But Naples stayed up. We did the best we could. We had people already thinking about it. And you move on, you know, the next play. And what are we going to do next? Let's don't dwell on the past. And I was already thinking about it. How would how could we use maybe a GoPro? Um, and then some of our supporters were going to introduce some ideas themselves
as to maybe a better way to do live video. So, we were we were ready and the hurricane season was not going to wait, you know, oh, let's let you figure it out. Nope, mother nature doesn't work that way. It's going to keep rolling on. And I had to make sure that I was ready to continue in the face of um a pretty

painful lesson that putting all your eggs in one basket relying on everything
being live with no backup. Well, this would be the end of that. We were not going to make that mistake ever again. So there was definitely Carrie had an expression, you know, they say lessons learned and he he likes to say lessons applied that you apply what you learned
and make something happen uh going
forward. That's very positive. So let's talk about where we are. We're at midepptember now and looking at the map
here, the 5-day graphical tropical weather outlook from the hurricane center. And I'll save this as our very first of many images that are going to come along for this episode. And uh it is it's the 8:00 PM tropical weather outlook map on Saturday, September 16th,
2017. And we got Jose in the Southwest Atlantic. And Jose was at that point in
time an 80 mph hurricane.
And um it was sandwiched in there between let's say Cape Canaveral in Bermuda uh to the southeast of Cape
Hatteris and well well well south to uh
from Cape Cod just to give you a reference. Well, look at the picture if you get a chance on Discord or on Patreon and you'll see picture number one. There's Jose. It's a hurricane. Yo have Maria out there. It's a tropical storm. Of course, it's going to go on to become a ferocious category 5. Yet
another one. And then we have Lee. And now it's like, well, wait a minute. Why do you have Lee in the Eastern Atlantic
and Maria is way ahead of it? Like what? So basically what happened is the tropical wave um that became Lee formed first farther

east and then the one that became Maria formed later farther west. So that's how
that works. Otherwise, it, you know, if they had formed quicker, it will be Lee
out front and Maria back to the east. It's confusing, but it is what it is.
So, those are the three players literally on the field there. And uh let's talk about Jose because Jose is going to be our next sort of uh field operation pretty close to home for me.
Uh and looking on the Twitter timeline here, that really helps me to piece everything back together. I've said that a lot lately. Uh it really does help because it's all there. I love it. Um so
yeah, we're in midepptember here and I got back from the Irma mission. Learned a lot from it as I just discussed and we were going to put some ideas into into being pretty soon. Um came back and I
did a podcast recording with John Evans
from WCT television, the NBC station in
Wilmington. and um his little title that
he put on there on his tweet, "Cat 1 or Cat 5 hurricane track goes into a hurricane. Why does he do it? Find out on my one-on-one podcast." So, I recorded that with him and uh we talked a lot about my career, my UNCW uh

schooling and my hometown ties there in
Wilmington and so forth. And then it was time to hit the road and um head up to
the Outer Banks to meet Jesse because
the swells, the energy from Jose, that

was all moving into the southeast United
States and parts of the East Coast in general. And you know that's an impact. We were having rip currents, some pretty big waves, some beach erosion. And it's an easy trip. I can go up there either stay at the Hilton Garden in and Kittyhawk. It's kind of expensive in September probably or uh down at the
house uh from our friend Dan, his family
house there in Rodanthy that I've been allowed to stay in many many times over the years. Maybe it'll show up somewhere in this Twitter timeline as to exactly
where I stayed. Um not that it matters much, but just whatever. Um so we get up
there and I meet with Jesse. Jesse's going to come down from Portsmouth and take some pictures and just kind of hang out with me. Um, I'll save this picture.
This is picture number two. Semi-related to everything, I guess. We were looking at the beach that night. This is the night of September 18th now. And, uh, we
found, like, ironically enough, a radio

sand from Lheed Martin that had washed
up on the beach. And I'll save the picture for you. Um, it was probably launched at some point. This is picture number two, by the way, in the, yo know, couple days before, I would guess. Um, it's a very light styrofoam deal. It's got some electronics in there and the balloon pops way up at altitude and then this little payload falls back to Earth and it's styrofoam and some plastic. And yeah, it's not the best thing, I guess, for the environment, but there certainly could be and there is much worse. You got to get the data somehow. So, I guess it's a teenytiny price to pay, but we found it. This thing washed up on the beach and I took a picture of it. I kept it for several years. Uh, then it got kind of rusty and it's got all the salt water on it and I finally threw it away. But there's a picture of it for you. Picture number two. And I I found it to be ironic because they definitely launched it um I
don't know, maybe from Newport. Uh I don't know all the weather balloon launch sites from the weather service, but it would have been either part of the daily launches or maybe one of the special extra launches they were doing. I don't know. But it was, you know, part of the data set that feeds the global models. And we were certainly tracking a lot at that point in time. Jose and Maria and Lee out there. and we found it like the the actual radio sand um that

uh washed up on the beach there in Kittyhawk. I thought that was interesting. So um we got out there,

Jesse and I, and this is where things start to get interesting in terms of our future. So, we still had the uh the

Ustream camera system. Uh but I also had

these GoPros, these Hero 4 and Hero 3

versions. I think they're up to like 12 or 13 now. And I knew that the GoPro

would run on a 256 GB chip. and uh the

internal battery, you know, just the stock battery, yeah, at least an hour.
Now, that's definitely nowhere near long enough to become any kind of an archiving solution. So, we looked at,

you know, maybe putting a um a larger

battery in there with it and plug it in
like it's charging and running at the same time. And that seemed to work pretty good, you know. Um, it did get
kind of hot as it charged up and we were a little bit worried that that might make it overheat and maybe even if it got too hot, it could catch that lithium battery on fire. That'd be bad. But I
recall that I think that we just needed to test one element here, like before we
got too deep into things, plugging extra batteries in and all that, you know, on a even a test basis outside of my garage
or whatever. I just wanted to see what would happen if we just take it baby steps. And so the first step here, this little baby step, is to put the GoPro in
time-lapse mode. And I would imagine
that in this situation, I probably put
it on one frame every 5 seconds, maybe
every 10 seconds, something like that. And that did extend the battery maybe 20
or 30 more minutes cuz it's not working as hard. and coding and recording and all the whatever that it has to do processing. And so this third picture that I'm going to save for you, this is September 18th. This is in Kittyhawk right along the walkway. We have used this beach access walkway so many times. It's right there at the Black Pelican and it's actually at Kill Devil Hills, not Kittyhawk. My apologies. It geotags it in the tweet.
It's it's awesome, man. It's all right there. All that metadata. It's beautiful. Um, this was at 11:41 in the
morning. I must have been staying at the Hilton Garden Inn, which is like a few miles up the road from from here. But anyhow, we set up the uh the Logitech
camera, of course, that's live, and that's going to run for about 30 hours. And then we set up on the next piling, and I'm going to save the picture for you so you'll see the new camera, this

GoPro, in time-lapse mode. And that's literally what I said in the tweet. I said twins. One is live, one is archiving in time-lapse mode. Good test here on the OBX, short for Outer Banks.

So, this is picture number three. And uh there we go. Saved it for you. And this is really the beginning of
the future and what would eventually go on to become, you know, really arguably one of the greatest victories in understanding hurricanes in all of human history. And I know that's a grandiose statement, and I'll explain further in uh season 6 once we get to 2018 and Hurricane Michael. Hint hint. But this was the start. This was it. You know, everything has to start somewhere and big things begin small and this was the start of that. This picture there that I've saved for you, that's important because this was the beginning of solving the problem.
All right. Um, so we drive around. Um,

we go down to Rodanthy in that area,
Merllo Beach. And I also want to note
that I'm in what I refer to as the
secondary Tahoe. Remember earlier that year, 2017,
Carrie wanted me to buy uh almost an

identical, and for all intents and purposes, it was identical. An identical, we'll just call it that. Uh Chevy Tahoe 2001 from a rock lot up

in Raleigh or Garner somewhere. He found
it online. It was like $4,900. And
Carrie said, "I'm going to fund it. Yo go get it." And we were going to use it for parts. But it turned out it was so wellkept. Had 230,000 m on it. But
oneowner thing looked like it was brand new. I mean, it was just amazingly wellkept. You know, had a few problems. We had to put 1,100 bucks in it or so to fix a couple of things, but uh far better than spending $40,000 on a brand new one. That's for sure. But it ran it ran really well. And the original Tahoe
with the weather station on it had been through all those hurricanes over 400,000 mi that uh the starter on it uh

crapped out. I remember this. It wouldn't start. I mean, literally your starter goes out, it doesn't even crank. It's just dead. You turn the ignition and nothing happens. So, I was like, "Well, I guess I'll use the secondary Tahoe, the backup Tahoe." Uh, and it had the Hurricane Intercept Research Team logo on it and hurricanetrack.com
text on the back. Fast Signs put that on for me. And that's it. No weather station, nothing fancy, but not unmarked
either. It was kind of low-key, but you know, I just wanted to mention that. So, that's what I'm driving. And uh Jesse and I go down to the Outer
Banks proper. I mean, I guess it's all the Outer Banks, but we go south to Rodanthy to Merllo Beach, that area. And the waves are coming in and it overwashes very easily, especially at times of high tide. Anybody listening to this that knows the area, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And yo know, we covered all that. And we go even farther to the south uh down to

outer uh sorry um Hatteris itself. And

it's interesting um right off of Cape Hatteris and it's literally a cape, yo know, as they call it a little point. You have Cape Lookout, Cape Hatteris, Cape Fear. Um there was this little island out there. you have these things called shoos and it's where the sand
kind of accumulates and the water gets much shallower and you have diamond shos that are out there. Uh and sometimes the sand will accumulate because of the way the currents are and it's very dynamic out there always changing over the eons.
Sometimes the sand will accumulate enough maybe it's just the pattern for a few months or a year or two and then
occasionally for eons like I said and you get sand that keeps on accumulating and you get the outer banks. But sometimes you get these little like sand bars that grow
big enough that they they stay above the
high tide line. And one such little
temporary land mass if you want to call it that called the point and other people I think called it Shell Island informal name. There's actually a Shell Island sort of in near Wilmington Shell
Island Resorts there. This is not that, but it was this little area, this little additional spit of land, and it's all sand that at low tide, you could drive
over there from Hatteris,
uh, and drive around in your four-wheel drive or whatever, but you better get the heck out before high tide or you'll be in trouble. You get stuck out there. People would go out there and go shelling. I think that's why they sort of dubbed it Shell Island. Um, you know,
just a small part of the story. Uh we
didn't go out there, but you could see it from where we were. It was not that far across this little shallow area of water. I think it's gone now. It finally, you know, again, stuff es and flows out there and eventually that thing flowed away or whatever. It's
gone. Um but it was just neat to be out
there uh in the elements. It was um
pretty windy, big waves coming in, these big swells from Jose. But while all this is happening, and this is where I want to go with this, um, Maria is a beast. Okay, so we're up

to September 18th, and again, it's that
evening and you know, Maria is a cat
five now, and it's coming right through Dominica, and it's going to go into the eastern eastern Caribbean, threatening Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands. It looked like it was going to stay south of Barbuda
and St. Bart and all those areas, thank goodness, but it looked like it was going to make a beline for Puerto Rico that the US

territory there was not going to get out
of this one. Irma went just to the north
and it really did look like in this situation, Maria was going to go right over Puerto Rico.

[Music]

[Music]

All right, back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway continuing. We are up to September the 19th, 2017
now and Maria is the big story capturing

the headlines. It's a 160 mph category
5. It has gone through the islands of the Eastern Caribbean directly impacting
Dominica and now it's taking aim on Puerto Rico. So, looking at the 11:00 advisory
package, and I'm going to actually save this image for you. This is the National Hurricane Center track map. And uh this will be, I think, picture number four or five, something like that. You'll recognize it once you see it. The 11:00 Atlantic Standard Time Advisory Maria in the Eastern Caribbean taking aim on Puerto Rico next. And
pretty much at this point, I knew that I
was not going to go to Puerto Rico to

intercept this. I could have. I chose not to because I was still seeing some
hints in the global models and other
people saying stuff on social media that
there was at least an outside chance
um that Maria would eventually impact
the east coast of the United States directly. some of the models, the ensembles, you know, beyond the 5-day

track forecast from the hurricane center, the official forecast suggested that. And I could not get stuck in Puerto Rico and then Maria, the

core comes like right over eastern North Carolina or, you know, Cape Cod or something. That's just not acceptable. I can't miss that. And I definitely would have gotten stuck down there. And we know that, you know, several of the hurricane chasers did get stuck and we'll get to that in just a little bit here. But at this point, I decided and
probably even before this point really, that I was not going to go to Puerto Rico. And um I'm glad I didn't in
retrospect. You know, I can look back and honestly say, you know, that's not for me. This thing was absolutely devastating for Puerto Rico as we all know. Um, but what's interesting,
similar to what happened in St. Bartholomew, where I met somebody who lived there through social media, Facebook in particular, Mirao Pharaoh and uh his now
wife. Um, they were there of course for Irma. We had a fan of Hurricane Track

and um somebody that we knew on social media, this gentleman named Carlos that was down in uh the San Juan area and he
was reaching out to me on Facebook Messenger and you know keeping in touch
that way and uh he was worried about yo
know certainly what would happen with Maria and there were a couple other people that we knew down there from the Storm 2K website. If you're familiar with Storm 2K, there's a member on there who's been there for a long time now, over 20 years. Luis, also known as
Cyclone Eye. He lives in Puerto Rico.
So, yeah, this was like, you know, if I'm not going to be there, at least I'll have some reports coming in uh from Carlos and uh he, you know, kept me
informed. He was very nervous about this obviously and it was taking aim uh
coming in from the southeast and so it would directly impact if the core was going to go over Puerto Rico would it would make landfall near Umaca
somewhere around there on the southeast part of Puerto Rico. And several of the
uh more well-known chasers went down there. Josh Morgan did. I think Mike Ty,
good friends of mine, those two gentlemen, Jim Eds, went down there, I do believe. And I really didn't have the FOMO. I'm I'm serious. Like, I'm not just saying it. Oh, you can say that now because I really It's like I'm not messing with a category 5 in an area that I really don't know that well. Puerto Rico is a US territory. I get it.
But no, that's not for me. And it really
helped me make the decision not to go there, seeing that there was at least some chance that um that Maria could

turn back towards the east coast cuz yo got to understand the reason that it is moving to the northwest and the reason there was this turn and if you do look at the track map um and let me just look in the little folder where everything is saved and I can tell you exactly. Uh
yeah. So this is picture number four. Let me re label it because I accidentally said uh number five, but
we'll reabel it real quick. Got to get it straight. If you look at the track map, you see Maria was going to turn more to the northnorthwest almost due north at around days four and
five, suggesting that it would turn away
from the United States. Now, we know that's eventually what ended up happening now, but we didn't know that for sure back then. And so understand the mechanics of hurricane steering that the whole reason Maria was going to turn northward east of the Bahamas in the
first place was because a trough in the
upper atmosphere would come through from the west and northwest from the United
States, North America, erode the ridge, the big subtropical ridge that sits out over the Atlantic most of the summer, creating a weakness and Maria can just follow that weakness. Now, we know that
sometimes, especially in the long range,
beyond the 5day mark and even sometimes,
you know, just within 5 days, things
happen. The ridge could fill back in. Sometimes the heat and the outflow from
a hurricane like Maria can help to add
more air into the ridge. There's some debate about that. People call it pumping the ridge. Um, and you know the

it's never a done deal. That's the thing. Beyond 5 days, forget it. Like
you just never know. And again, there were some ensemble members that got this much closer to the US, specifically the
Outer Banks of North Carolina. Remember, I was right there anyway already with
Jesse. We were doing some testing of the
uh the GoPro uh on this time lapse test.

one picture every few seconds, whatever we had it set on, and you know, seeing the effects from Jose, which did pass
between Hatteris and Bermuda, by the way. Jose did, and it went on up, yo know, pretty darn close to New England. Um, and no, I didn't go up there. This was this was all painful cuz I you know
in a perfect world where I know I'm going to be safe and you know you never do but you know in the perfect world yes I would have gone to Puerto Rico if I knew that I would be safe if I could get back to the US in time you know but we don't know those things and again with Jose going up towards New England I could have gone up there gotten some of the impacts on Cape Cod but um you know
the travel time watching Marie area figuring all that out. I really had to, you know, stay put. So, I stayed in
eastern North Carolina, Wilmington, went up to the Outer Banks doing this testing as I've talked about. But yeah, um I
knew I wasn't going to Puerto Rico. So, we had Carlos down there and uh some
other people of course and we're following what Josh was saying, Morgan uh on on Twitter especially, and uh
Maria continues to intensify at this point. I'm going to look through the uh the map here and just move this through time. 5:00 p.m. Tuesday the 19th. Uh

Maria is up to 165. And by Wednesday
morning, let's jump ahead to the 5:00 a.m. advisory. It is knocking on the door of making landfall and winds are

down just a tad to 155
and it's going to make landfall. core is going to come just over the southeast
part of Puerto Rico and then Maria, the
the entirety of the hurricane, the core, you name it, is going to go basically the length of the island souththeast to northwest, the whole of the island. an
absolutely devastating track. Uh considering how strong it was,
how much rain there was, you know, the topography, the geography, everything, the geomorphology, the hydraology, all those ologies of uh Puerto Rico really stacked the odds against them.
And the radar went down as we know. Um,

we were watching river gauges down in the island and you know, I was getting information coming into me from Carlos
and things were just not good. I mean, that goes without saying, right? And,
um, it made a devastating landfall. Um,

and I posted a picture. You can see Jose
out over the northwest Atlantic. Uh, and Maria in the same shot. I'll save this for you. This is picture number five. Uh

there's the folder. There we go. Come on, don't do that. There we are. So, there's picture number five. You see, uh Jose up in the left hand corner just off
the northeast coast of the United States starting to transition to extratropical
spreading out its energy, all that stuff. And uh then Maria, a classic
perfect outflow. I mean, the picture doesn't even look real, but of course it is. And um that happened on the 19th and

this thing uh this thing this cat almost
five hurricane. And you know what bothers me about that? That's that's the wind. The Sanra Simpson scale, the flooding from Maria was catastrophic. So
in my book, it's a category five, right? It's it is it was a devastating. We now
know that a lot of people were killed. We don't know the official tally. That's a whole controversy in and of itself. But these rivers, the flood gauges on them spiked very quickly. We know that
there was landslides, people swept away. It was horrifying. And I was glad that I didn't go cuz yo know that kind of stuff like that really is um concerning you know my safety and

just seeing that and and me being in North Carolina being aware of it. Uh it hurts cuz you know these are people that um some of them probably didn't even really know how bad it was going to be. You know not everybody has in 2017 a
smartphone and they're not keeping up with it like we are maybe. And you know, they might guess that something's coming cuz it's getting windier, but this was terrible. It really, really was. So, um, it peaked, by the way, at

175 mph, uh, late in the day on the 19th, just for what it's worth. Luckily, windwise,
it did weaken just a little bit. It started sort of this eyewall replacement cycle deal. Uh but man, it it cut in

there and it made landfall. Uh and it

was just devastating. And when did it do the landfall there? This was um now
we're up onto the 20th and it made landfall that day. Yeah. So it made landfall in se September 20th. Ran the
length of the island like I said uh southeast to northwest and now it is in
technically the southwest Atlantic at this point. also at this point and we are now up to kind of late day uh the 11
p.m. advisory uh on the 20th of September. Now the
official forecast does turn Maria back to the northeast
pretty much halfway between Bermuda and
Cape Hatteris. And so a lot of people were kind of saying, "Oh well that's it. It's going to go out to sea, you know, it's going to recurve as they say." um
and miss the United States. That's the official forecast. That's what it was suggesting. Even the cone of uncertainty, as they call it, the forecast cone, a lot of different terms for it, was comfortably offshore of both
Bermuda and the Outer Banks of North
Carolina. Now, there would be indirect impacts. The high swell, high surf, rip current threat. Certainly, that was going to be a big problem. And for the
north coast there of Dominican Republic and the Turks and Cikos, southeast Bahamas, uh they were under a hurricane warning because it was going to pass close enough to potentially bring hurricane conditions to them. But in terms of a direct impact to the United States, it started to look like that was not going to be the case. But there's always a butt, right? um things can change and we know that

even the 5-day forecast can change and
so I'm staying on top of it of course because I wasn't 100% sure nobody was
100% sure let's be honest we don't know 100%. So I watch it through the 20th
through the 21st and you know the models

Euro Canadian GFS ensembles operationals

all that the the weather data from all kinds of different balloon launches. There's just a lot that goes into this and I wasn't going to just write it off and say, "Oh, okay. It's definitely not going to hit the US." That's a disservice to my audience to just assume
that because I don't know. I don't have that crystal ball. And you got to be perfectly clear about that. And I wanted to make sure that if this got close enough to the Outer Banks, especially that it was now a historic hurricane
with these two devastating landfalls,
the first at Dominica and then Puerto Rico. And we were learning more and more about the devastation in Puerto Rico. And it really was terrible. the suffering down there and the aftermath. That's the worst. I was not walking away
from this. So, um, at some point here,
now this is important. All right. So, I'm going to kind of pivot a little bit. While all this is happening, um, a good friend of our our project and a gentleman that I've known for a long time, going back to the early days of
everything, his name is Dan um, Dan
McGee. and uh he has been a big follower

of my work. Um uh offers ideas from time

to time. He's pretty knowledge knowledgeable about tech and uh telecom
stuff. Um just a great adviser, great friend. It's his house that uh we get to stay at uh the crew and I uh in Rodanthy, the family house there. and he
was telling me um of course we know
about well let's back up a little bit we know what happened there with Irma that the Logitech cameras tried to reconnect
Miami Marathon Marco Island they couldn't cuz Verizon was down and then they gave up the cameras did and they turned off after four or five minutes you know it's just a flaw built in but a
flaw nonetheless that doesn't help me so Dan had told me about a security

camera that he used at some of his
properties, uh, the family properties in
New York, New York State, um, and of course on the Outer Banks at Rodanthy. Um, called a Nest Cam. It was originally
a drop cam and, uh, Nest, Google Nest,

Nest Labs, whatever. I don't know the whole history, but it's called the Nest Cam. and um you uh pair it, you know,

sync it with your home Wi-Fi as an
example. And it's got this little dome egg shape to it and it's magnetic and you can it's got a long cable uh and it
could either be plugged into the wall or there's this little junction thing where it's USB USBA, you know, the big fat USB

and so you could potentially plug it into a battery pack. Hint hint, right?
Uh so he said, "Yeah, there's this Nescam." Um and he sent me one uh

probably off of Amazon. And uh he said, "You ought to try it out, you know, and you can pair it to one of your Verizon
hotspots." He said it works great at night. It's got good low light visibility. Uh you can set the um resolution kind of low, medium, and high. It goes up to like 1080. And the beauty of it, he said, and this
is from his experience using them as security cameras, it'll try to reconnect if it loses connectivity. If the internet source goes out, the Nest Cam will try to
reconnect basically until the end of time if you allowed it. As long as it's
got power, and even if the power goes out, you don't have to turn it back on.
it's just on and it'll reconnect to the
internet that you have synced it to till the end of time. And I was like, "Oh, that sounds pretty good." So, he sent me one uh they're like a couple hundred
and I had been playing with it a little bit at the house and just testing some things and I started getting motivated,
you know, really kind of antsy about Maria and uh all the stuff that was
going on. We had Maria out there. We just had Irma. We had Jose. We had Lee. There's just a lot going on. And my brain was just working overtime. Like,
we got to solve these problems here. Yo know, we've got to have a better camera system going forward. Um, you know, we
don't want to be stagnant. So, I set the
Nescam up to power it off of one of our

battery packs. Uh, it's called the Max
Oak K2, just to tell you. And it looks
like the size of like a 6x9 book, yo
know, and it's a silver kind of heavy couple pounds. It's a 50,000 milliamp
battery pack. Carrie had found these
couple of years earlier and we they were used to power the Logitech cameras and
the Verizon hotspots. That's why we were able to get over 60 hours of run time

because of these batteries, these Max. We just called them the K2s for short. All right. So, remember that. So, I took the K2 and the Nescam and uh the Verizon

hotspot with it. And I went down to
Rightful Beach uh the night of September 21st. Again, I was just I think I took a
couple of the kids with me too. Hey, yo want to go to the beach? Dad's going to try something. Crazy dad here. Uh hey,
at least it's late September and the water's nice and warm and the air temperatures are too. And I just wanted to test it for a little while, you know, just see how it worked out in the open,
you know, away from the garage or the house or whatever. And uh I put it on
the night vision mode. You run the whole thing from your phone through the Nest app. And uh it stores everything in the
cloud, you know, on the Google Nest system, whatever. And so yeah, I went down there and set this thing up. I say set it up, I like walked around in the surf with it. I 15 20 minutes. No big, you know, I wasn't out there for hours. And this was at uh 9:25 p.m. on
September 21st. This is the very first
picture. And this is important. It really is. This is the very first picture. It's uh because you could do a still frame easily by doing a screen
capture right on the iPhone there, my iPhone. And um I posted it on Twitter. I

said, "Future of our unmanned CAM network with a question mark." You know, hm, maybe. So, successful test this evening at Writesville Beach. And then I did a little smiley face thing. And that
was the very first picture from the the
live video. Again, it's a screenshot from the iPhone of what would be the
future of the live cameras. I didn't know it yet. This was just literally the first, hey, let's go see if this works. and what does it look like at night and all that stuff. And uh lo and behold, it
worked. Okay, it looks pretty good at night. Um and I think that might have been why I was testing it. I had probably done some testing at home during the day in the garage or out in the backyard or something. And now I needed to see what it did at night. And I purposefully did the screen capture where you can see the wave coming into the shot. And all
of this is just from the LED, these red
like weird LED things that create the light. And it's not infrared, is it? I don't know how it works, but it's not a flashlight. That's just literally what it looked like from the Nescam's point of view. And it's like, okay, this this works pretty good. All right. So, stuff
that in your back pocket, so to speak. Remember that moment. the evening there of September 21st did a nighttime test and it worked. Okay, great. We'll come back to that. Oh, will we? So, we go on,
we get to the 22nd and
um we have models that are uh starting
to come out, you know, 12Z run, whatever. And I mentioned this on the
Twitter there. I said, "Well, the 12 meet Z models uh all shifted west, but
not enough for a landfall yet." Waiting
to see what the ECMWF shows. And there,
this is the key. This what I was telling you. It seems more ridge builds in. And
I started talking about that more. People were starting to get concerned because they're seeing this on social media from me, from all the other people that are posting about Maria. And again, Maria Post Puerto Rico has everybody's attention. So, I'm answering people. Yo I'm talking about um uh you know, how how the ridge could fill back in. And here's what's interesting. Jose was the key to all of this. And I kind of realized
that by the by this point on the 22nd,
Jose was stuck up there off the New
England coast in the Northwest Atlantic.
And the longer Jose hung around,

the more of that weakness would be there because you're not going to have two tropical cyclones occupying the same general area. Sometimes that happens and they pivot around each other. That's called the Fujiwara effect. But this is not that. You know, they're separated by a pretty good distance. But but keeping Jose, as we say, stuck in the pattern
meant that there's a weakness there where Jose is to the north and northwest
of future track potential of Maria. Yo
understand? So if Jose is there, there's not going to be a ridge there and Maria will just turn on like a parabola on out into the open Atlantic between Hatteris and Bermuda. So I said this I said uh

less Jose sooner would mean more ridge
possible and more west uh before uh

Maria would slow down and potentially turn to the east because eventually we're getting to late September here. These troughs are going to come down some good fall air, that kind of thing and stuff's going to get swept on out. Uh so we're really starting to watch this and you know time's going on. Uh,
we're waiting to see what Jose is going to do. And I posted an interesting picture here on the 22nd. I'm going to save this for you. It's I probably just took a picture of the laptop or something. Uh, this is picture number seven. And I said on the Twitter there,

uh, talk about the Bermuda Triangle exclamation point. You have Hurricane Maria down in the extreme southwest Atlantic just north of Hispanola. the
remnants of Lee way out east and that
also knocks down the ridge a little bit. You know, all of these things matter. And then you have Jose a good distance south and east of uh Nantucket and
Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod area, right? Look at the picture, you'll see. And then Bermuda is right in the middle of the three. Bermuda Triangle. Absolutely.
So Lee and Jose kind of Let me just say
it this way. If there's no Jose and there's no Lee, I am pretty sure that
Maria would have just run right up the east coast and it would have been one of those historic hurricanes. already is, of course, but it would have been made even more so because you would have had this big strong ridge sitting out over
the western Atlantic and it would have just steered Maria right into the southeast, probably southeast North Carolina and then up the Delm Marva and
probably over Long Island like a Gloria situation in 85, but just a little bit more to the west. That's my I I really believe that yo you take Jose and Lee out of the picture and I think that's what would have happened with Maria, you know, but as we
know that's not what happened. Lee and Jose were there. But but uh GFS, yo

know, this is uh another tweet that I put out 5:47 in the evening there on the
22nd. And the tweet was, "As I was
saying, this is why it's not over until it's over. One model, one run, but it's
not 10 days out either." Now, unfortunately, this is just a cropped shot of uh the GFS at I'm guessing this

is the 850 mibar level possibly. Uh, so

I don't have a like the time stamp on here, I guess. You know, like when is this valid, but it's probably like six or seven days out, something like that. Maybe five. It's definitely not 10 days out because that's what I said. And boy oh boy, it's got uh Maria just to the
southeast of uh Cape Patter. And I'm
going to save this picture as picture number eight. And some people on the Twitter there were appreciative of my

um stickuitedness or whatever you call it, my you know, I wasn't walking away from this kind of thing, my vigilance. One guy named Edward said in regards to what I said about it's not over till it's over. Edward responded, "No, it isn't. Kudos to you for pointing this out days ago." While many were perhaps
prematurely writing Maria off, I enjoy
your videos and insights. And Carla
said, "Until it's north of us, yeah, pay attention." And you know, that means a lot to me that it's not an ego thing, but you know, it's good to know
generally what you're talking about. Um, you know, even if it's something in the future, I wasn't just grasping at straws, you know, for likes and engagement and fear-mongering. No, no, no, no. We know this. That's not over till it's over. It's It's obvious. Um, so yeah, I said right here it is the 850 mibar level in a a later tweet. And um,

so Maria, not over till it's over. And
we were learning that model run after
model run. Now we're up to the 22nd still here. I'm just looking through my Twitter. 11:52 p.m. Um, there's a uh

Southwest Florida Water Management District map that shows the spaghetti models. You know, Levi's got them over at Tropical Tidbits. There's plenty of websites now that have the spaghetti models, all the different plots of the globals, the ensembles, the um the
consensus, you know, looks like a bunch of spaghetti with colors. Um, and the uh

uh the one that I posted here, this the screenshot again, probably off my iPad. Somebody had posted it on Storm 2K, there were more and more models now getting closer to Hatteris and this blue
one. I'll save this picture as well. Uh,
and this again, this is why I was on top of this, you know, so stubbornly. The UK
Met, which was the blue one in this shot. Uh it's like these blue squares with the line drawn, you know, to connect everything. Uh it's a pretty like low resolution plot compared to some other stuff that's out there, but whatever. Um I said that's the newest UK
Met and it's about as close to a landfall of Maria at Cape Patter as one can get. any more west and it's in I

mean that would that would put the core of whatever Maria was going to be at that point that put the core right over Cape Hatteris at uh whatever day this was going to be down the road um probably day four something like that
and yeah yeah that's what I said 96 hours and the very next tweet just after midnight people are asking all about what what are you what is that show what are you saying what are you seeing whatever I said yes 96 hours out too not five or
seven days and so this was very important 4 days out you know the UK met

a reliable global model it's part of the
consensus models you know it's it's not you know uh acme model whatever right
it's not some cheapo it is a big deal
part of the overall like it's a respected model and it was pretty far to the west u and You know, to be fair, it was the farthest west, but enough of the other models were also pretty darn close. It wasn't like the UK Met was way over on the left or the west of the guidance envelope. And there were a lot of ensembles. If you look at that picture, uh what I say it's eight or nine, whatever, there's all sorts of other little lines in there, little squiggly lines, and plenty of those. Those are your ensembles. A couple of them are over Wilmington. Some are over Jacksonville, North Carolina into the Mid-Atlantic. And yo know, one of them is up there near the Georgia, Florida border for goodness sake. So that's how ensembles work. They do sort of the what if, right? But my my point is going into all of this, Maria
was a potential threat to the Outer
Banks. and I thought it would be, yo

know, I wasn't going to just like blow it off and I was going to be ready just
in case, you know, of course I am. Um

then on the 23rd, and this is an interesting post that I made, 3:49 p.m.
September 23rd, I kind of got my um it's

not vindication, it's validation, right?
um that my intuition about all of this
kind of paid off cuz I really got to emphasize how close I was watching this.
You know, like this was not just your run-of-the-mill, well, let's see what happens. For whatever reason, I had a lot invested in what would happen with
Maria. And I think it was because of the Puerto Rico landfall, the Dominica landfall, and how absolutely devastating
that was that if this made a third landfall in the US, even if it just nipped the Outer Banks, and that's quote unquote all it, all it does, and then it goes out to sea after that, I'm going to be there and I'm going to do the best that I can. Might even get to test some of this new technology, maybe the GoPro in
time-lapse mode. you know, I had I had some plans. You know, I was going to be ready big time ready and uh learning
from everything that um I took away from
sort of I guess we could call it the Irma defeat. You know, you move on and
you you get ready for the next play and I was absolutely ready. So, here's what the the headline from the hurricane center said, and again, it validated my
feelings here that I was on to something. And it said, quote, "Maria
continues northnorthwest. Interest along the Carolina and Mid-Atlantic coasts should monitor the progress of Maria." I was like, "Boom,

there you go." you Leo, I told you like
I just felt like it was going to come more west and uh that was very, yo
know, validating to say that phrase again. So I cranked out uh another uh
video discussion. You know, those were just fast and furious, of course. And they also went on to say that tropical storm or hurricane watches may be needed for a portion of the coast on Sunday.
Yeah. And so I said uh a couple of my headlines, Hurricane Maria could become an issue for portions of the North Carolina coast this coming week and so forth and so on. Right? So this was definitely starting to uh get the

attention of quite a lot of people. So just uh another model plot that I want to save for you here. Uh another cropped
picture from this is from Levi site. He's got the model plots there on his dashboard that he's got of uh like the current storms or whatever. And I said on Twitter, "So much for out to sea that I may still not cross the Outer Banks, but this is far from out to sea in my
opinion because a lot of people kept saying, you know, this is going to go out to sea." Um, this is picture number 10 and it actually has up there in the address bar, this is not from Tropical Tidbits. This is from the UKAR site. The

uh what is that? University of Colorado atmospheric research. Something like that. Uh it's funny cuz it says Google
Maps is using your location. It's just you'll see if you look at the picture. That's really funny. I don't know why it says that. I was driving somewhere. Whatever. But yeah, some of the models there at day four, more of them were much closer now within a mile or two it seemed of um of of coming right into the
Outer Banks. And then Maria kind of makes this hard right turn northeast turn out to sea after that. Anyway, it
was very impressive. Uh looked like maybe it was going to approach category 4 strength. Uh it had weakened some of course post uh Puerto Rico. Um but uh

yeah, this was this was something that I
was definitely going to be

absolutely sure that if it was going to get that close, I was going to be there. And uh we get up to the that weekend
um and we're not, you know, we don't
know for sure still like that that was the thing. It was going to be a very close call, but uh and I said things
like every bit west matters now. Like it was going to come down to potentially miles. Um once we figured out um

that it looked like it would not get the
core right over the Outer Banks, but
close enough to maybe bring tropical storm conditions. And that was around the 24th or so. Uh, I decided I was
going to go ahead and head up there and at least test out some stuff. They did put some uh storm surge watches up uh
because you could have and Maria had a big windfield. So, this is the 24th of September. They put a storm surge watch up. I'll save this graphic as well. And
uh the big windfield around the western side of Maria, any onshore flow uh could

put, you know, 1 to 3 ft of surge in there, something like that. And so I wanted to make darn sure that uh I
covered all of that and uh rough seas, the whole bit. So coastal flooding was a possibility. Um you know, Maria starts weakening by the 25th, but it is going
to make a pretty close pass to the Outer
Banks enough so that I'm going to go up
there. So, I'm going to leave on September 25th to head up to uh
Kittyhawk and Rodanthy and do my thing.
But before I went, and I'm going to save these two pictures for you, something really neat happened. I got invited uh

by the Discovery Channel and a production company working for the Discovery Channel out of Canada. They were producing a documentary
about Hurricane Matthew the year prior,
2016, and they were doing this kind of eyewitness video, firsthand,
minute-by-minute chronological order. It was a different way of doing things. Um,
you know, like as it happened kind of thing over the course of the hour that the show would be. And so they would use
firsthand video from people that were, you know, that stayed, uh, first responders. It was kind of a different
slant on how to cover a a hurricane. It was a pretty neat, uh, method to tell
the story. And, you know, they knew about me and what I do and our project and everything. And they wanted to interview me and do what in the business we call these talking heads, you know, the interviews. And so I had the the
secondary Tahoe as we call it. Still hadn't fixed the starter I think on the uh the original Tahoe maybe. I don't know. But I do remember that I um I took the other Tahoe up to the Outer Banks. I
had a few things packed in there. Yeah, this Maria was not going to directly make landfall. We knew that by now, but I still had a few things packed up. And I went out uh to some park somewhere and

we were out in the open and they miked me up and everything and this crew from Canada from Discovery Canada. They're out of Toronto or do you call it Toronto? Anyway, um they did a uh I did

my talking heads as they call it or I'm one person so I did my talking head. So I'm going to save these pictures for you. This is the production crew and uh there's two pictures. These will be pictures 12 and 13. And um this was kind of late in the afternoon as well. And I remember I was a little bit pressed for time. It's about 5 hours to get to Kittyhawk. And this was let's see what time this was. 3:00 in the afternoon, you know, and I we still had to shoot everything. And I had to leave and get on up there. And I probably wouldn't get to the Outer Banks until, you know, 10 or 11 at night or something. Stopping somewhere for dinner, whatever. But I thought that was pretty cool, you know, that uh I was going to be in this documentary uh a year or so later. You know, they have to edit everything and get all this footage because it was a like I said, it was a different way of telling the story uh of Matthew in 2016. It wasn't going to just be a few shots and just blah blah blah. is going to be a very detailed chronological order of all these different videos from people from their cell phones, from security cameras, from cop car cams, and news footage, and they
were going to put it all together so that it fit like a puzzle, like a mosaic, if you will, but in chronological order, as as Matthew came
in there. So, I did that and then finally got to jump in the Tahoe there and make my way up to the Outer Banks to at least get as close as I could to what Hurricane Maria would bring to the area.
[Music]

All right, back with you now. Stores from the hurricane highway continuing. We're up to the 25th into the 26th of September, late September 2017. And I'm
on my way by myself to the Outer Banks
of North Carolina. Going to tackle the
impacts from Hurricane Maria, which is
going to be well offshore, but it's got a big windfield. Got tropical storm watches and warnings up for portions of the Outer Banks. And I figured, why not?
You know, it was an historic hurricane event for our friends in the Caribbean.
I would at least get a little piece of it up there in extreme eastern North Carolina. So, after wrapping up the interview with the Discovery Channel crew who had come down to southeast North Carolina from Toronto or again, as
I said, is it Toronto or Toronto? Anyway, great crew. Awesome hanging out with them. shot what we needed to shoot
and uh I was on my way kind of late and I was tweeting and posting and talking about Maria and what might be coming next which would be Nate and uh I was I

was ready. I had a couple cameras with me and uh got out to the house in

Rodanthy, staying at the McGee residence there. And early in the morning of the
26th of September, the Atlantic nice and
angry and uh right around 10:00 in the

morning, I posted a video from Rodanthy,
25 30 mph wind, a little bit of rain,
pretty good cloud cover. for us on the western periphery of the cloud mass and
the windfield of Maria. And just looking at the graphics here, Maria was a 75

mileph hurricane at this point in time.
In fact, let us save this picture, shall
we? This will be picture number 14. Do
the save image as. There we go. Picture number 14 for you in the archives there. Maria uh southeast of Cape Hatteris at
this point. I posted the 8 a.m.
intermediate advisory for you. Uh top winds were 75 and it was moving due north at 7 mph right along that 73°

longitude line and I was way over there
at a little past 75 west. So it's a good

120 miles or so east of me
eastsoutheast. but it had a big windfield and if you look at the picture you'll see the orange doughut looking deal. Um that was the tropical storm
force windfield the extent of those anyway and I was going to be ready for whatever it it dealt the region uh with any onshore
persistent flow. You could get some big waves. So I went over to the Rodanthy Pier which is just like right there real close to Dan's house the family house there. posted quite a few videos on Twitter, put up a couple of cameras. Um,

I don't remember exactly where I had, probably somewhere in Rodanthy, one certainly up at Kittyhawk or Killevil Hills to be more accurate over at the Black Pelican and the little walkway that goes over. We've used that spot a lot. And these are all streaming in our app, Hurricane Impact. And um, I think I
had two of them running. Yep, that's what I said so far, too. uh in the Rodanthy area. So, I guess I had two already in Rodanthy and then I was going to head up to Avon and Kill Devil Hills to put a third one. Um and I think Jesse
came out to help out a little bit. I I don't remember. I don't see any mention of him in here, but um regardless of all
of that, I was out doing what I do, covering the effects of the storm, different videos and pictures I was posting on Twitter. Um, Highway 12 very
famous or infamous for flooding, that's for sure. Uh, and either from rainfall, which again on the west side here is pretty dry, so there was not a lot of rainfall, but we were approaching high tide. We had stiff onshore flow, so yo
bet we had um pretty decent amount of
storm surge. I don't know, I mean, a foot or two. you know, it it makes it for an unpleasant day, but not anything

they couldn't handle. Drove through Hatteris Village, posted videos of that. Let's see what time I posted this. 3:14 is when I posted this particular video and uh got shots of the Pamlico Sound.
That's the body of water to the west of
the Outer Banks. A lot of wind surfers like to go out there. Pretty good white caps on there. and um you know just
covering whatever was happening and uh
the wind was howling. We get to the nighttime. I spent the night, stayed out until the next day. Now we're up to the 27th of uh September. Um I do remember it's funny here. I'll post this one for you. Another picture. Picture number 15. Come
on. There we go. Uh it looks like some kind of a creature, you know, but it's not. It is actually some uh driftwood.
It looks like burnt. It's just the way the iPhone took the picture at night. It looks like almost looks like a burnt octopus or something. A wild picture.
And I said at first I was a little concerned that I might have stumbled upon some kind of a sea monster. Lucky
for me, it was just a washed up stump.
Um, so Maria again pretty far to the
east in terms of the core or hurricane force winds, anything like that. Finally up to the 27th and um we had the camera
running down there at uh Killevil Hills
and here's a screenshot from it. It was
pretty easy to take screen captures from the Logitech stream and this is what it showed. A little bit of beach erosion. If you look at this picture, this is picture number 15 or 16, something like that. And um I had a little funny. I like to try to be humorous from time to time. Whether or not it sticks when I
try to do humorous things, whatever. I just put it out there. I said, quote, "The sea was angry that day, my friends." And I said, "Well, maybe that's George Castanza standing there cuz there's a dude in the shot and uh some guy walking on the beach." And if you are a Seinfeld fan, you know the
episode. Uh the sea was angry that day, my friends. Haha. Um it was it was pretty roughed up out there. Uh low broken clouds, onshore flow, still the backside of Maria, big old windfield.
Um I had a camera down in Avon. Uh camera up in Rodanth and a camera out there at Kill Devil Hills. Meanwhile,
we're still dealing with the aftermath, of course, uh, from Irma. And at some
point here on this 27th, I got a couple pictures in. I'm going to save these for you as well. These are from Mirco. Remember, our friend Mirao down there in St. Bart sent me some photos of a vehicle that looks like it had been shot
up with a machine gun, but no, that is
the impacts from windborne debris in a

category 5 eyewall. There's two pictures
I'm saving for you here. Picture 17 and picture 18. Check them out. I really encourage you to do so. Uh, this vehicle
annihilated the windshield blown out again. And it looks like bullet holes in the side of it. That is the power of
wind. Here I am on the Outer Banks. The main impact that I'm covering on the west side of Maria is storm surge,
onshore flow, some storm surge, lowland flooding, high waves, that kind of thing. But when you juxtapose that to

these pictures that Miro had sent me, just remarkable, frightening. Like I I just I don't want to be in the eyewall of a Cat 5 hurricane like that. That's just not for me. I mean, maybe if I'm in a wellbuilt building that I'm 100% sure
is going to withstand all that, but even then that's got to be just frightening.
And these pictures really showed that. Um so, uh took some slow-mo video kind

of having fun in the uh the foam down
there. And these are all on Twitter. These are videos, so I don't have any way to show them to you, but uh you get
this like foam, seafoam that gets very
thick down there from these waves, the froth that comes in and these gusts
would hit the foam and sort of explode
it is a good way to put it. And it would just blast out and hundreds of thousands

of little pieces almost like packing peanuts flying through the air, but it's not. out at Seafoam and I thought it'd be cute to get down in there and put the iPhone on slow-mo. I think I had an iPhone 5 at this point and I would do the slow-mo and uh post that on social
media. I mean, there wasn't much else happening. Pretty big waves out there. Some people surfing, people playing in the waves. Got to be careful, of course, from the rip currents that could happen, right? Um, so yeah, I put a couple of uh
shots of that and kind of compared it to, well, up north you have blizzards and snow blowing through the air and down south here on the Outer Banks, uh,
you have blowing foam. And then I made reference to something I'd be doing soon. Again, this is September 27th. I said on Sunday I fly to Florida to head down to the Keys to retrieve the gear from Irma.
Very interested in seeing what the animometer recorded over at Vodka Cut
because remember we had the weather station there for Irma. Everything went out, the network went down. Normally if
the network comes back up before the
batteries run out on everything, we can remote into the little Raspberry Pi computer. And uh that's what we were using at this point in time. And yo know, it's interesting. This is the first time I guess I've realized that here in the 2017 season. I know we were
using a mix of little Acer laptops,
those little mini laptops we used to have. And I guess in 2017 we must have switched over to these Raspberry Pi computers. There you go. I mentioned it right here on my next tweet. I said the data should have been recorded hopefully on a Raspberry Pi computer which logged every 1 minute via the average wind uh
the peak gust per minute and the average pressure per minute. All that was hopefully sitting on the little Raspberry Pi computer down there and I was going to be flying down um what was this? This is a Tuesday.
Yep. Tuesday this uh no Wednesday the 27th. Let's move all this out into time
so I can make sure that my maps that I'm referring to as I produce all of this match up everything. All right. Um, so yeah, 11:00 a.m. on the 27th. Maria was
now due east of me by the way. Still a hurricane, huge windfield, at least tropical storm force winds still raking the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but Maria was headed out into the open Atlantic from this point on. You know what? I'll save this picture as well because this will be the last of the Maria track map pictures. I guess this is what are we up to? 19. Yep. Picture number 19. There is Maria heading out into the open Atlantic after earning its place in hurricane history. But the season was
definitely far from over. Um, you know, we had gone

through, we had early in the season, uh,
Brett and Cindy. Cindy gave us some flooding down there in Mississippi. Already covered that. Brett was like this little warning shot deal early on in the main development region. So there were some signs, but then things, yo know, kind of died down a little bit and there was some talk that maybe the tropics are going to just be too stable, too much of this tropical upper tropospheric trough around or what we call the tut. You know, there were people that were opining that the peak
of the season, you know, and even when we had Harvey, they're like, "Ah, that's probably going to be it." And then, of course, we had Irma, we had Jose, we had Katya. Now, to be fair, Katy was way down in the Bay of Campichi, but at one point, I want to remind you, we had three systems, three hurricanes going at the same time. And our ACE score, the
accumulated cyclone energy for 2017 was
really starting to climb. And now we had had Maria and we're getting towards the end of September. And again, people are kind of thinking, well, you know, stuff's probably going to start winding down and that'll be that. There there are there are those that hype things up too much and then there are those that like to downplay things. I've been on the road a lot since basically the eclipse. I even tweeted about that that I mean I feel like I've been going non-stop. That's literally what I said since 48 hours before the Great American Eclipse. What a year. And we still have to get through October which is obviously looming. It's coming up next and it looked like that could be pretty busy. I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail before we wrap up this segment, but I'm pretty much done. I spend one more night out there, the night of the 27th into the 28th. I'm going to collect my equipment uh in and around Hatteris Island on the 28th. Uh
some of the salt water still lingering in some of the streets down there. It takes a while for some of that flooding to dissipate and there's people coming in. Lots of fishermen like to go down there. It's not the height of tourist season still, but there's still enough. You know, people that like to come down to the Outer Banks from the DC area, Ohio, um you know, inland areas, they they love the Outer Banks. And Maria didn't leave too much of a mark. But historically, I mean, wow, what a what an event Maria was for the Caribbean. And I just thought it was important to go out there and cover what impacts of it would occur. And I did. I grabbed I

grabbed a sunset picture as I leave finally on the 28th. I'll save that picture for you here as well. What a nice little shot of the the setting sun over the Pamlico Sound as I head home
and um get ready for October which

looked like and I had even stated this this is a great last post here uh the
28th into the 29th. Now, by the way, it's about a 5h hour roughly trip from

Rhdanthy down to Wilmington. I may have mentioned this before, but just thought I'd throw it out there again. And another, by the way, it was really nice to be able to stay at the house of the McGee out there, uh, the McGee family beach house.
Um, in Rodanthy had been doing that for several years, and this was just another
terrific example of how that really helped me out a lot. I was right where I needed to be in the heart of the action about as close as I could get to the impacts uh from Maria as minimal as they
were and it really was. We got to keep this all in perspective compared to the Caribbean. Obviously what happened on the North Carolina Outer Banks was just not even you know it's 1% right it was
very very minimal but they are impacts
and I just felt like it was important especially how close I live why not why not go out there and cover it but part of that equation is I didn't have a hotel room cuz I was able to stay at the McGee residence there in Rodanth and that just really meant a lot to me getting to know people in that area as well gradually learning ing the names of people that live around there. Um, that would come in handy later on. Right. So,
yeah, Maria going on off into the Atlantic after quite the legacy down there in the Caribbean. And I'm all done. I head home and uh I had this
really sort of prophetic tweet post. This will wrap up this segment and then we're going to move into Nate and that's where we're going with this. I said a few areas to watch as we end September,
but I believe that October has the potential to be quite busy. That was my post there on Twitter on the 29th of September after returning home uh the
late evening on the 28th. Back in the office, looking at things, getting ready for October. And sure enough, the next name on the list is going to be Nate. And boy oh boy, this one is going to be one of those benchmark moments again. that will literally help us turn the corner, set a new uh milestone, any of

those metaphors that you want. Nate was a big deal. It was going to be a really big deal. A highly successful uh great team effort, all of that. Uh plus, we finally get to launch Herby,
the all weather balloon payload, into the eye of a hurricane, and that would be Hurricane Nate. And we'll cover that next as we start the next segment. [Music]

All right, here we go. Welcome back to Stories from the Hurricane Highway. This next segment I am very excited about.
Uh, one of those pivotal moments. Yo know, we have a few of those throughout the history of what we've done here with Hurricane Track, but uh this one, Hurricane Nate, um one of those benchmark moments. I I say that often, but it really was. And I'm very excited to get to this. It'll be probably broken up into a few blocks here. Uh, a lot of pictures coming and a lot of absolutely just fantastic stories here, details of how things were

going to change because of Irma and then

applying the lessons from Irma immediately for Nate and it really
really did pay off. Plus, we finally get
to launch the weather balloon Herby into
the eye of a hurricane. So, let's get to

it. All right, so we are now up to the end of September. Maria has come and gone, at least meteorologically,
the pain, the suffering, the aftermath. I mean, it's probably still going on, right? Uh but I returned from the Outer Banks and it wasn't too many days later
uh that I would get ready to go back down to Florida. This is around the 1st of October and I was going to fly into Fort Lauderdale, rent an SUV, and then
go around and uh pick up all the
equipment because and let's kind of go
back a little bit for the Irma mission.
I ended up leaving pretty much everything down in South Florida because
I ended up uh in Georgia when it was all
said and done. So, I I didn't go back down to Miami and get the camera from Taylor from the condo, the 19th floor. I
wasn't able to get out to the Florida Keys. They were closed for I mean at least a week, maybe more. Um probably a couple weeks. And Marco Island and Naples, all the same. I just wasn't able to get back. And then we had Maria and I

had to deal with all of that, you know, work and the hurricanes and everything just kept coming. And it wasn't until
this brief lull in activity at the end
of September, first part of October that I was finally able to get down to Florida to pick everything up. So, flew into Fort Lauderdale and went out uh got
the SUV, drove down to Miami and uh met

up with Taylor Trogden. We had dinner somewhere there in Bickl. He brought the camera stuff with him. I didn't have to go back up to the 19th floor. Obviously, at this point, the elevators are just fine, but nevertheless, he brought the equipment and we had a a dinner and just
talked about things and the future of everything. And I was explaining to him
my plan going forward that the defeat
there of the live cams going down
because of the loss of the network signal that I mean there's nothing I'm going to be able to do about that part of the project going forward. but at least have some kind of a backup that for all these years, you know, what is it now? 12 years that I hadn't been doing this, uh, started in '05,
we relied on everything being streamed
and saved that way, which that's actually not entirely true. The very first part of the project, we did have backup and it was an old VCR. I say old,
I mean they're old now. Uh we use VCRs
or SVHs VCRs to that's super VHS to yo

uh to record everything in like05 through 09. So for the first four years
or so, five total seasons, 05, 06, 07,

08, 09, five total years. Um we did have
backup by way of these SVHs recorders.

And but once we switched over to Ustream
um we and and using either the Ustream

platform which would record onto the laptop or the cloud. Uh basically once
we got cloud recording starting in '09 this is the simplest way to put it. We didn't have to worry about having VCRs anymore. But I then became reliant on

everything being recorded in the cloud. And that was uh at the same time, what
do they say? It's it was all at once very convenient because it meant that everything could get smaller. We were using smaller laptops. I mean, these little notebooks as they called them uh to stream to Ustream. We didn't have to have a VCR. We didn't have to have as big a battery, you know, all that stuff.
And uh but it did make me completely reliant on making sure the network was up. But in this case, we were using Verizon and they had done spectacularly
well for all these years. We first started using Sprint and then by 2012 we switched over to Verizon and uh their LT
LTE network was just superior to what
Sprint had. And so that's why we made the switch. But you know, fast forward all these years now we're up to 2017 and it's post Irma. I'm sitting down there having dinner with Taylor, kind of laying out my ideas for the future. And one of them was to start utilizing a
GoPro cam to at least do time lapse,

take a picture x amount of seconds apart, interval recording as it's called, and it would save to the chip.
We had a 256 gigabyte chip in the GoPro.

might have been 128, but that's neither here nor there yet. It does eventually matter, but not right now. A big chip though. Um, and uh it would run off of a
little uh external battery in the case

um that would give it, you know, probably 30 or 40 hours of run time. Yo set it on interval recording, you know, time-lapse mode or whatever it was called on the the GoPro, and it would snap a picture every 1 second, 2 seconds, 5, 10, 30 seconds, every minute. You could set that in in the GoPro, and then you would have thousands
of highresolution images on the chip and
then I would have to then go into something like Adobe Premiere and stitch it all together to make a movie. It's basically like stop motion animation if you think about it. But I thought, okay, this will be what we what we do going forward. Um, and you say, why didn't yo just run the GoPro um video, you know, in at 720 or 1080,

4K, whatever. And some of the testing that I had done, um, the GoPro, even at
720, would just get too hot and it would

just shut itself off. Uh, the the processing power with the battery, uh,
you whether it was plugged in. In fact, plugging it in to an external battery so that it's charging while it's recording
seemed to make it get hot faster. So, for the time being, all I could do was
the time lapse because it just it didn't require as much processing power on the
GoPro. Even setting it to one frame every 5 seconds, you know, every 5 seconds it has to take a picture, that is nothing compared to the processing power of recording 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second. And just think about that. You know, motion picture film is what, 24 frames per second and then high frame rate is like 48 is double that. Um, most video is 30 frames

per second, some of it 60 and then yo can get up to high frame rate stuff on smartphones now at 240 frames per second. So, you're talking about a lot of data and a lot of processing power for a teenytiny camera, a GoPro that
honestly, as my wife has said over the years, looks like it came out of a Cracker Jackack box. So, yeah. Um, but

Taylor and I were just discussing the
future of all of this. He was very much in favor of it, as was the hurricane center. um unofficially obviously they can't you know put some oh we're we
endorse Mark Sudden federal government it doesn't work that way but internally and working with these folks individually um it it was definitely and I I had
their support for many years obviously cuz this is a great idea put cameras where we shouldn't be see what we capture and we can show the impacts of even the most severe tropical cyclones and everybody will be no worse for aware as they say, right? So, we uh talked
about that and then we talked about um maybe even having a new live cam uh from

Nest, Google Nest, uh that used to be
called a drop cam that Dan had given me, our friend Dan McGee. I did a little bit of testing with it. I talked about that as I was waiting for Maria and Jose was
out there and all that. I tested the Nest Cam uh down at the beach that one night to see how well it did at night.
But uh basically this dinner, as most of my dinners are with any colleagues, just a lot of shop talk. You know, I'm going just constantly coming up with what if we do this and you might tell a story and then it helps to maybe hatch some
new idea based off that old story. It's just weird how that works. Um, but it did it worked and it was nice to hang out with Taylor and I got the equipment back and um, it was early evening and I
decided I was going to head on down to Marathon and uh, Vodka Cut area that
night because there would be less traffic. There was a lot of traffic in and out of the Keys because of the reconstruction and the rebuilding and the, you know, debris removal and so forth. So after dinner, I drove down to
Marathon. And I think I talked about this before in a previous episode, so I'm going to revisit it now in more detail. You'll remember if you remember all the stuff I've told you. This will Hey, that sounds familiar. So I get down there and
um everything's still there. The animometer is still attached to the
steel pole and that is lashed or splinted or however you want to call it to the side of the bridge there. And the
camera box is still there. Everything's still there. It's chained up. Locks are still intact. Everything's fine. And it's probably, I don't know, 9:30, 10:00
at night, something like that. Kind of late. Not a lot of traffic at all. I pulled right into basically where Mike Adams, the gentleman that helped me set it all up where he and I pulled in with the Tahoe to set it up uh back in what
was that like September 8th or so. Um
you know for the arrival of Irma and I got out, I walked over and I thought, well, this will just take a couple of minutes. I need to unlock the chains.
You know, they have these padlocks on them. Unlock everything. cut the stuff
down with scissors. Uh, and um, yo

know, and I remember I stopped somewhere like at a CVS or something to buy a pair of scissors. I can't fly with them. I didn't have any checked bags, you know. I just had a little roller bag, but yo can't fly with sharp objects, duh. So, I had to buy some scissors. I just bought some cheap like $3 scissors somewhere
and um, unwrapped them, you know, got them out of their little box thing or whatever and the packaging. walked over to the equipment and I brought my keys
with me of course for these locks and um
the first lock I don't remember which one it was on um not a problem. I think
it was the the camera system that was I
had to jiggle it a little bit and wrench it in there but took a little effort but I got it off put the camera box um in
the vehicle the rental and I went back to get the weather station. There was a lot of Gorilla tape involved, different things Gorilla taped to the the I-beam of the bridge. So, I started cutting some stuff. And the pressure sensor, we were using an RM Young pressure sensor at this time. Um, very expensive, by the
way, over $700 for this one little pressure sensor. Uh, but they're supposedly very accurate, so, you know, we wanted to use only the best. Um, but
it's inside this little tiny Pelican case. Um, I mean, you could put like
your iPhone, maybe two iPhones in there, like, you know, it's small and it and we drilled a hole in it and the cable came through it and then you seal it off and the cable runs into the other box, a larger Pelican case that's got the Raspberry Pi and the battery and the uh
the hot spot and all that stuff. Um, so I started just clipping things off, cutting zip ties if we had any. And um
then I went to undo the lock to the chain uh around this case. I remember we had Mike and I had wrapped everything around so the cable was nice and taut
and you know like everything was secure, right? But I couldn't get the key to go in there. And I worked on it for a couple minutes. Went and got my bottled water, probably some Fiji water. I thought, well, this is the purest water on earth, so they say. I'll pour that into the lock and maybe it'll get any gunk, maybe some sand is blown in there or some salt and uh it'll clean things out. And I didn't have a syringe though. I didn't have any way to force the water in there. So, I did try to kind of squeeze the the bottle, but I didn't want to waste all my water and still kind of hot down there. Um, but so I
kept working on it and I couldn't get the lock to come off. And I think I texted Carrie, I mean, I'm sure I did. And he was like, "Well, try this. Bang it. Hit it with a hammer." I'm like, "I don't have a hammer." He said, "Well, just bang it on the steel railing. Yo
know, you want to loosen up any gears that are in there, any of the mechanism." And I did. I worked on it for probably 10 minutes. uh did everything I could and I could not get the key to go into the lock. It just
wasn't happening. And it's getting late and I got to get back to my hotel. Um I
think I was staying in Naples that night. I was just going to go on up to Naples via uh 41 uh the True Alligator

Alley, the Tamiami Trail. And because
the next day I needed to do Marco Island. I wanted to see Dan Summers up in Naples proper and you know get the
camera from where we set it up in Naples. I had stuff to do and then I had to fly home you know cuz hurricane season still very much going. We're going to get to that. So you know 10 minutes turns into 15 minutes and you're down there at Marathon about halfway down the Keys. You know time's ticking and I'm kind of tired. I've been up for a while flying. you know, like, all right, we got to get going here. So, I I
couldn't get the thing off, so Carrie said, "Well, you know, just open the the
case." Um, and uh the case may have had
a lock on it, and that opened, but yo
know what? We didn't really lock things. Um, and in a way in the future episode,

that'll come back to bite us eventually. Uh, I just don't remember if I had locks on the cases themselves. might have. But

I was able to get into the case. I say cases. There's the little case that had
the uh pressure sensor in it. And then
there is the Pelican case that's uh the
best way to describe it. Um it's like
probably twice to two and a half times the thickness of a briefcase and about the same width and length, you know. So, you could put um if you bought a brand
new laptop and you had the box that the laptop came in, you could put that inside one of these Pelican cases and it would fit nice and snug. So, it's not a big one. And like I said, it's like an oversized briefcase. And it's uh Gorilla
taped to the girder, you know, the I-beam. I cut all that off, but I couldn't get the chain out. The chain ran through the handle and everything's chained up. there's just nothing I can do. So, between talking with Carrie about it, I thought, all right, yo again, I got to go. I'm just going to strip everything out. You know, if I have to cut a couple wires, so be it.
I'll buy some more. Um, but I need the
equipment. I need the animometer. That thing is $1,800. And I need the Raspberry Pi cuz that's got the data on it from Irma. I need the pressure sensor. That's $800. Whatever.
I need the hotspot. So that's what I did. I just stripped everything, yo know, like I I tore everything out carefully, cut any wires I needed to cut. I felt like I was trying to diffuse a bomb, right? Um and put everything in

the vehicle, kind of disheveled, but there it was. and um closed the case

back, cleaned up any mess that I might have left, and I just left it, including
the steel pole uh Gorilla taped to the
I-beam. It's not bothering anybody. It's not in anybody's way. It's a little unsightly, but you know, it's it's like there was nothing I could do. I didn't have a grinder where I could just cut through the cable. I didn't have any big bolt cutters, you know, just I was stuck. So, I yanked everything out, put
it all in the back of the rental, and I was done. And I left everything there. And I thought, well, maybe one day I'll get back down here, and maybe Mike Ty could come down. He lives down there, and he could cut stuff off for me. We'll see. We'll figure it out. It was not a really big deal, honestly. You know, like I said, I wasn't littering and leaving a bunch of batteries everywhere or whatever. I brought everything back that I could. So, um, I picked

everything up. Uh, went over to,
uh, Naples and Marco Island. Spent the
night, you know, Southwest Florida, basically. Next day, I head out and I go
down to um, Marco Island, and the the camera is still there. Everything's chained up. I'm looking at a video of it now on Twitter. Um, hopefully I posted a picture. I don't know if I did. It doesn't look like I did. That's fine. I got other pictures I can definitely share with you. Um, uh, this was easier.

The lock was easy to get the key into.
And I got the, um, the Logitech camera
box off the concrete pole at Cambis boat

ramp there in Marco Island and I was good to go. Let me see what time this was. Uh, 3:40. So, you know, I must have
slept in. Probably had lunch with Dan or something. did a video discussion that day. Um, you know how it goes. It's sometimes you just have a late start. Uh, but I got that camera. And speaking of video discussions, this is going to be the next picture. Let's see what picture we are actually up to here. That'll be helpful. Um, all right. So, we're at picture number 21. So, while all this is happening, and uh, by the way, this is October the 2nd. Uh there's rumblings literally that we're going to get a new development in the Caribbean Sea and we're going to have something moving up into the Gulf of Mexico in early October. So picture number 21 will be
just that. um a uh screen capture right

off the iPhone of the Tropical Tidbits
Euro uh page, whatever the Euro run 12Z uh

that day, late that afternoon, October
the 2nd. And there it is. Uh kind of a large sloppy looking system. Looks like on the Euro it's headed towards the Big Bend of the Florida area. 5 to 7 days
out, you know, something to watch obviously. So yeah, we we'll get there. Um, so grabbed all the stuff. Uh, was not
too difficult. Picture number 22 will be all three cameras that I picked up. Um, and you can also see the uh,

this will be a really good picture. Let make sure I save it first of all. Number 22 here. Uh, this is the back of the
rental. You have all three cameras, the the camera boxes. There's the animometer back there. Couple battery packs that were powering things. Um, there are some chains and cables. Those that I was able to get loose. Couple bungee cords are hanging out. There's the pressure sensor box. This is kind of nice. If you can take a look at this pick, remember it's on the Discord and on Patreon with this
episode. And um, everything so far so
good. you know, I only had to leave a little bit of stuff behind as I talked about down there at Marathon. Um, but
yeah, I grabbed everything. I was done
and it was time to head back to North
Carolina. And uh what I would do though, I remember this um somewhere in Miami

um I stopped I went over to a FedEx
uh like pack and ship place and I was
just going to ship everything back because I didn't have any way like I I
can't I didn't want to airline little individual cases and the animometer and all these wires and everything like yo know what I'm just going to go to FedEx and I'll have them box everything up in a large box. They'll pack it. It'll cost, you know, 100 bucks or whatever, but everything will get shipped back to me uh safe and sound. And so that's
exactly what I did. I went over to FedEx somewhere in the Miami area and um I
sent everything back to myself. I don't know, it's like a two-day trip ground, FedEx ground. Uh and then that gave me less to have to worry about while I was flying back, right? It just makes life easier. Now, uh, we're up to October 3rd

and, um, getting ready to fly back, getting ready to get on the plane and the euro, the 12Z GF. Uh, come on, Mark.
The 12Z euro for this day, uh, October
3rd. I posted this on Twitter at
uh, 2:28 in the afternoon. Um, I said,

well, that is certainly interesting from the 12Z ECMWF. We'll have to look into it deeper and work on a blog post while flying back
from Florida. And I'll save this pic for you. And if you know what we're looking at here, you know that's quite a difference in the previous picture. Uh it's looking like something pretty formidable could be coming up through the Gulf towards the first week of
October. And of course, the next name here is going to be Nate. We're up to
the instorm. Yep, Nate. So, I finally get back uh the night of October 3rd.

And the very first thing that I need to do, of course, is go over the data that
we collected during Irma, uh down there at the Vodka Cut area. Um, and so I
brought the chip with me. Obviously, I didn't need the Raspberry Pi. It's tiny. It's like, you know, twice the size of a deck of cards or something. Tiny little Raspberry Pi computer. I brought that back with me in my bag and um uploaded
the data uh or I think all I had to do is turn the thing on, put it on my home internet again and Jason could remote into it and our our good friend and programmer and allaround computer gur Jason, we have a lot of those dudes that help us out and boy does it make a huge difference. But he was able to remote in there and uh grab the data and start

working on it and uh turn it into charts
and graphs. Right. Um but uh that
evening um yep right around 7:30 I

either was landing or had just landed. I don't know. Uh but there it was. We had invest area 90 L and it had a high
chance of developing over the next 5 days. is I'm going to save this picture for you because this really is the beginning here. Like, all right, I guess we're really going to do this. Uh that we're going to get uh an
early October hurricane threat in the
Gulf of Mexico. And again, it is going to give us an opportunity to do something absolutely extraordinary.

All

right, here we go. Back at it again. Stories from the hurricane highway continuing and we have TD16 out there.
It is October the 4th, 2017.
Tropical depression 16 has formed in the southwestern Caribbean, forecast to become Nate and also forecast to become
a hurricane and make its way up towards the Florida panhandle. But here is the
just unbelievable irony of all of this. And I hope you really pay close attention to this. All right, so this is the first advisory and uh I'm saving the image for you here. Let's see what this will be. Uh like 24, something like
that. 25. This is image number 25.
And take a look at it if you can. Uh
look at where it's going. The forecast
uh was for landfall on Sunday
uh right across the Florida panhandle. And if you connect the dots, this particular map that I saved didn't have the center line on there for whatever reason. Um, the hurricane center provides one with the center line and one without, but connecting the dots shows that Nate is forecast to make
landfall basically at Mexico Beach. And

come on, the irony of that. What happens one year later, almost to the day, is

just incredible. I mean, if you think about it with Michael in 2018, and we'll get to Michael in season 6. Season six is going to be a phenomenal season. I'm excited about it. But we're still in season five and we're still to TD16, which is forecast to become Nate. So, this is the fourth. I spent a lot of time obviously on social media, looking
at all kinds of stuff. Storm 2K, analyzing this, analyzing that, video updates, getting all the equipment ready. Um, by the way, everything arrived back to me from Florida from
FedEx there on the 5th. And uh, I got

all the cameras unpacked, all the batteries charging again, everything's ready to go. You know, we're we're going to do it. Um, I'll talk about the crew and everybody, the vehicle we're going to use and so forth as we move forward. But the modeling is now starting to indicate as we get into the fifth that there might be a little bit more ridging over the western Atlantic and therefore Nate could be shoved more northerly and
make landfall either in southeast Louisiana or right into Mississippi, something like that, and then turn into the southeast. And this too could also bring a pretty big threat of a very heavy rain. Um, so here it is on the 5th
and I said on the Twitter there, I'll be leaving North Carolina for the Gulf Coast tomorrow morning. So that will be October 6th. Going to take four cameras,
two weather stations, and one Herby, the
hurricane research balloon, the weather balloon. Is this it? Is Nate the one? We

were really excited about this. And by we, it's going to be myself. Carrie's
going to come over from Houston, Todd Pai, is going to come with him. And then a young man from University of South Alabama, this gentleman named Mitchell Sacados. He's going to join us as well. I'd met him at the severe weather symposium way back in the spring of 2017. And uh USA, the University of South Alabama is right down there in Mobile. And so he was going to come over the day of landfall. Um, but in addition to
these four cams, the four live cams, I
didn't mention it on social media because I wanted it to be sort of a surprise, I was also going to test sort
of experimentally slash operationally,
again, unofficially this GoPro
that would do time lapse. Um, essentially thousands and thousands of pictures that I would then stitch together into a movie. So, it's almost like stop motion animation if you think about it. Uh, that was the idea here is to uh set that
up somewhere and and give it a test, see how it does and hope that it worked, right? So, the four live cams, those are all the Logitech cams, the GoPro cam experimentally, couple weather stations,
uh, and then the the weather balloon stuff. Carrie would be bringing the helium in his truck and, uh, we were
going to be ready to go. We've been working on this since 2012 with lots of
different testing and I just felt like
this is probably the last landfall of the season and what a season it's been. If it is safe and Nate has any kind of an eye left at landfall, let's give it a
shot. You know, almost no matter what, let's just get that thing up into the eye into the stratosphere and see what happens. You know, why not? We don't have anything to lose except the payload. And you know, we had never lost one yet. So, uh throughout the fifth, there was a lot of talk on social media
uh about the intensity. Everybody's focused on intensity and I understand that, but at the end of the day, of course, it's all about uh impacts, but
intensity does inform impacts obviously in many cases. And there were some indications that Nate could strengthen significantly before landfall, that everything could line up right. And it looked pretty ominous overall. And I was talking about this in my video discussions. And I put one of those discussions out at uh 5:00 p.m. on October the 5th
there. And I'm just going to play a little bit of this and then we'll come back and we'll keep uh moving forward with our discussion here on eventually what's going to be Hurricane Nate. First, let's take a look at the satellite loop this afternoon. And yo can see again just a huge area of energy down here. Nate is located right in here. Going to move out over the very warm waters of the Northwest Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Honduras, where conditions should allow it to strengthen. You can see that there is definitely a little bit of stronger upper level wind flow coming out of the southwest, and that is mentioned in the discussion, which I'm going to read for you in just a moment. Uh, as it stands, it looks like somewhere in this vicinity could get a direct hit by a hurricane on
Sunday, Saturday into Sunday, Sunday into Monday, something like that. It all depends on how fast Nate accelerates
around the backside of the ridge of high pressure that's going to set up shop over the western Atlantic over here and steer Nate off to the west. And I mean, not necessarily like that, but uh we don't have any big sharp fronts coming in, you know, big longitudinal troughs like this that are having Nate come out of the tropics like that. You remember Wilma? Wilma was kicked out by a trough. That was later in October. This is early October. Water temperatures up this way, still very warm. The atmosphere is acting like it's September, more or less. And here we go. we're going to have to probably deal with a hurricane uh along the Gulf Coast. So, let's look at the discussion. And the one this afternoon was written by >> So, that discussion I posted a little bit after the 5:00 p.m. advisory package. And between that time and the
11:00 advisory from the hurricane center, I continued to get things ready,
uh, packing up the Tahoe. Um, I'll talk about which Tahoe I took in just a minute. These little details are important for various incundry reasons, but you know on social media, Twitter, the Facebook, posting YouTube videos, little snippets here and there, talking on the phone, texting with people, it's just a very, very busy time when there's a hurricane threat imminent. And sure
enough, by the 11:00 advisory, uh, and I'm going to save this, uh, picture that I posted on Twitter. It's literally a screenshot. This will be picture number 26. It's from the 11 p.m. advisory

package. Um, and literally the headline here from the hurricane center is quote, "Nate's center about to move offshore the eastern coast of Honduras. Hurricane and storm surge watches issued for a portion of the US Gulf Coast." And
whenever we see that, anybody in the business here or if you're in the area where it's coming to, that sort of
starts the clock officially. Once those watches go up, it's real. This is coming. The hurricane watch is up, the storm surge watch. Now, the interesting thing about this particular weekend um that we're approaching is that, and
this is Thursday, by the way, this is a Thursday, Thursday, October 5th. that weekend. A, you know, bad timing is an
understatement. The Gulf Coast had this big car show that was going on. I don't remember the official name of it, but I think they do it every year. It's like the Coastal Classic or something. And um
there was going to be a lot of extra people down there. I think the thought process is, hey, it's early October. Most of the hurricane season is behind us. Usually don't get anything major in the Gulf in October. It's rare. Uh so why not? And so there's literally going to be a lot of people down there, many, many extra thousands of people. And that
made hotel rooms scant. They were very
hard to find. And any ones that were open, uh, they were exorbitantly expensive. I was like, "No, you know, I'm I'm not I'm not raking in the money. I can't do that." Um, I mean, we were we're talking like $280, $350 a night.
It's like, golly. And there just weren't many to choose from. But we had to have a place to stay. Can't stay in Montgomery. That's 3 hours away for goodness sakes, if not more. So, I chose Wiggins, Mississippi, which is north of
Gulfport area by we'll just call it 45 minutes or so. Um, right up highway 49,

I think it is. Wiggins, Mississippi, Hampton End there. Carrie, Todd, and myself would stay there. And you know, it's a little bit of a commute to get down to the Highway 90 area to set up our four cams, but who cares? You know, we got a job to do and we shall do it. But I wanted to make that clear. They do have this big auto show. Old cars, new
cars, souped up cars, whatever, classics. And there's a lot of people that are going to be down there and they might not be paying attention. you know, they're visiting the casinos. They're having a good time doing the car thing and yikes, right? Um, so I leave on the
6th and I'm going to make my way down the old hurricane highway there. And I think that's when I kind of came up with this term in my head, the hurricane highway. Um, I really do I think that sort of manifested itself in 2017.

That route Wilmington 7476 over to the

interstate 95 south a bit into South
Carolina get on 20 at Florence head west
Columbia Augusta Atlanta and then finally to Montgomery south on 65 yo
hit 10 and you're there you know wherever there is you can go east or west accordingly. That's one of the routes on the hurricane highway anyway. But I've been doing that so many times over 20 years, you know, that I was like, "Yeah, this is the hurricane highway." It really is. Um, it certainly
solidified its place as sort of a name for what what what I call this whole thing, this adventure. Um, and here yo
are, stories from the hurricane highway, right? Uh, equipment wise, I want to save this picture as well. It's kind of a cool picture, especially how neat everything is packed. This is picture number 27. It's the back of the Tahoe. I was using that other Tahoe, the secondary Tahoe that Carrie had purchased for the project earlier in 2017. Half the miles clone identical literally
of the other Tahoe. Probably made at the same factory within just a few weeks of each other, honestly, back in 2001 when they stamped these things out. But this one was in better shape. And um it did
have some a little bit of oil leak uh because I've got a look at the picture. I got some Valvalene um what is that like a five quart uh
thing. It's a big old jug of it of motor oil and I have the cameras in there. Uh
there are five total cameras. Four are

live. And then one of those is the GoPro
box. Yep. We're going to put the GoPro in there. It's going to do the time lapse. We've got the weather station. I think we had two weather stations. There's probably one in the back seat. Um, and we got the drone in there. Some extra gas cans and miscellaneous things here and there. And um, I was ready. So,
I hit the road uh on the six there. Went down that old hurricane highway. And
since I take 65 down to 10 in Mobile, I

cut west. and our very first camera late
in the night there. Not too late. We'll call it late evening, but since it's October, it's already dark. Uh very first camera we set up. I had Carrie and Todd meet me out on 90 somewhere along

uh sort of that marshy area of Mobile Bay. So, it's not in Mobile proper. It's
like somewhere along the bay. There's a few restaurants out there. What is it? the USS Alabama, I think, sitting out there. The battleship. It is a battleship, right? Um it's not the submarine. I think that's fictitious from Crimson Tide. But anyway, um we set

the first camera up along 90 and uh cuz

it floods with just a decent onshore flow, believe me. And we were looking at a pretty sizable storm surge. There could be four to five feet, maybe more of inundation above ground level. And if
if if if this thing could just come in in the daytime, we would see it all. Yo know, at night, yeah, you never know. Depends on if the power stays on and the street lights work. But, uh, we got the first camera running down there in Mobile and it was facing east and it
would run for 30 hours or so. This is
the six. We felt like this should give us enough time to get to landfall. Um,

and if we had to come out and change the batteries, we could, but um, it was late
enough in the six that we thought, "Yep, this should be just fine." And, uh, we should make it to landfall. So, that's the first one, uh, set up. And then we all went up to Wiggins and, uh, checked into the Hampton End there and, uh, got a good night's sleep. And now on the 7th, it's time to really start getting
everything set up, right? Uh, let's see what time this was, by the way. October the 6th, 11:28 p.m. Mobile, Alabama. I

did tweet out, I am currently in Mobile, Alabama getting ready to set out the first of our camera systems down here.
Nate is almost a hurricane. So, yeah, I thought I'd put it up pretty late there. And um you know, 30 hours or so would get us presumably uh right up to the point of landfall and we should be fine.
So, it takes a little while to get up

there to the Wiggins area. Uh, and

through that process, you know, you got to get into Mississippi, you got to go north. Um, you know, new information's coming out, new model data, whatever. And it is starting to look like, uh, this could intensify more. In fact, let me look at the official hurricane center word on all of this. Um, let's see.

That's Thursday. Hey, what date is that? Uh, that's the fourth. Uh, no, that's the fifth. Sorry. So, let's get up to the 6th. I'm trying to get this map extent right here. Um, the sixth. The six. Where are you? All these intermediate advisories cuz there's watches and warnings out. Um,

all right. So, here we are. Friday, October the 6th, 11:00 advisory. There
we are. So, at this point in time, Nate
is sitting at 70 mph. It's moving northnorthwest at 22. It's in the Yucatan channel. Uh this is a good image
to save. Uh might as well just to keep
us all caught up. And let me figure out which picture this is going to be. Um so
we are up to let's see this will be 28.
All right. Sorry. I just got to keep it all straight for you. So this is picture number 28 and uh Nate is forecast to

become quite the significant hurricane. may be knocking on the door of category 2. And the storm surge is forecast to be

pretty significant, maybe 6 to 8 ft depending on exactly how it comes in and
so forth. And remember, this is overnight, the 6th into the 7th, and
it's going to make landfall later in the day, maybe overnight the 7th into the 8th because it's going to be moving quickly. And I was tweeting this out. I said, "People are going to wake up. They're going to get ready for church tomorrow. This is Saturday into Sunday.
And they're going to realize a huge storm surge is headed for the coast. And I mean, 6 to 8 ft, that's huge to me. 4
to 6 feet even, that's life-threatening. Um, and we were really concerned that if it rapidly intensifies, even for 6 to 8 hours, and generates
that big surge in the Gulf, pushes it into the Mississippi Sound. the wind can drop off, but the surge will already be in motion, which is what we saw in Katrina. And look, Katrina was a cat five. This wasn't going to be anywhere near that, but you know, it it could
really be a problem. And it looked like it could make landfall between midnight and 2:00 a.m., which was a bummer. Yo
know, another nighttime. Seriously. Uh, but people are asking, "When do yo think this is going to come in?" And I said probably between midnight and 2:00 a.m. Sunday into Monday. So this is
going to be overnight Sunday. So people have all day Sunday. Again, a lot of churchgoing people down there. Very busy. Got that auto show going on. And
this is going to be potentially a nasty surprise for people. Um I tweeted out here, Nate is now a hurricane and is moving quickly towards the northern Gulf Coast. What time did I say that? 7:30 in
the morning. So, I got some sleep the night of the 6th into the 7th. And Nate is a hurricane at this point. So, let me look at the track map from the hurricane center. This will help me to figure everything out. Um, so yeah, the top
winds are now um 80 mph

and it is forecast to strengthen possibly becoming a category 2. I think at some point, if I'm not mistaken, the
official forecast did show 100 milesPH,

maybe even 105. I don't want to There's no reason to really get into those details. We'll certainly look at the um the advisory stuff as we go forward here, but it was starting to look a little bit more concerning, that's for sure. And um we
had to still set up the weather stations and the other cameras. Uh but the good news was time is running out. I mean on one hand that was good. We know exactly what our window is and let's get it done. So we started working on everything that morning. We all went back down back down to the Mississippi coast and we started setting up stuff in
Gulfport down at the small craft harbor
formerly the Yeri Pier area. And uh that
camera was terrific. Um, I'll certainly
talk about it more as we go forward, but man, that was one heck of a shot. Uh, we'll get there. Uh, I'll discuss it. But I think we put one of the weather stations there as well on top of the offices of the small craft harbor. I knew the harbor master, um, George Manaman very well from Storm 2K. He was

on there and met him in the years since
Katrina and we had interacted and he's allowed me to put equipment in the marina going all the way back to 2012 if not sooner honestly. And uh just a terrific guy. Unfortunately, he uh has passed away within the last year or so or so. He's no longer with us. Sorely missed. Terrific gentleman. He retired and then had an illness and he died which is sad but boy what a legacy he
left and what a good person. So all those good memories follow him for sure. What do they say in Gladiator? I know it's fictitious but you know what we do in life echoes in eternity and George was a big part of our success down there
and just an all-around terrific guy. We interacted with him, worked with him about where to put everything and uh we're we're getting to it. Uh Carrie and Todd and myself uh working hard. Um
here's a radar scope shot I'm going to save for you. Time stamps right on there, folks. 12:51 p.m. And uh this
will be officially picture number 28.
There's the outer edges. Check. Take a look. This is neat. That's why I like saving these things. This is why I do it. And this is why I'm glad they're on Twitter, too. But I do I save everything off the iPhone onto hard drives. All that stuff will be here hopefully forever and ever. Uh, but there it is. There's the outer band of Nate. Uh, big
thunderstorms coming in, closing in on the Mississippi Sound, closing in on southeast Louisiana. The wind is picking up. The pressure gradually falling. It's hot. It's humid out there. You know, like, wow. It's going to happen. Um, so

then we're done with Gulfport. We get everything set up there and then we head over to Beluxy at the Buxy Bay Bridge or

maybe it's Ocean Springs technically. Um, I don't know exactly like I mean obviously back then I knew exactly. We had a geo tag of precisely where it was set up, but I'm going to save this P. This is a great P. I've been waiting for to get to this. Uh, this is picture number 29. And this is what I'm talking about. A beautiful picture of how
everything should look back in the day. This is how we did it back then. And yo fully understand how we were doing things. That the animometer was

um spinted, fastened, whatever you want to call it, to the I-beam there of the railing of the bridge. And it was solid.
You put enough Gorilla tape. I've said it so many times. It's like steel. It's like welding. You layer it. You layer it. You layer it. And you do it just right. And we took advantage of what we had uh zip tied the pressure sensor on there. That's at the bottom of the pole. And then there's the box with all the stuff in it. And yes, we just left it sitting there. We assume that people
will have common sense and won't mess with stuff. And through this point in time, nobody had messed with our stuff.
So, there's that because eventually they will. We'll talk about that in many episodes down the road from now. Our luck eventually runs out, but not today. Um, people were, you know, getting ready for the hurricane or whatever. But, uh, Todd helped me get this up and running. And what a great, um, setup that was.
And it was terrific wind data coming right off the water there, unimpeded. Um, perfect. I mean, really. And probably, if I had to guess, it's got to be close to 30 ft above the water, maybe
just shy, maybe 25 ft. So sighted, the
sighting of it, as it's called, was as close to perfect as you can get. And this would yield some terrific wind data. Um, and then the squalls start
coming in. I'll save this picture. This is picture number 30. I told you folks, a lot of pictures in this block here,
this segment of the uh of the of this episode. Um, especially for Nate here, of course. We're up to picture 30. And it is a uh a screenshot of the camera from Gulfport out on the Yuri Pier there or the small craft harbor. Uh, white caps on the Mississippi Sound, the squall coming in. Uh, a few less people
out there, right? Um, then we went over to Waveland and we worked with David Garcia, our friend over there. Um, and
Mike Smith. One of them was the mayor. I can't remember back in 2017. I think it was Mike Smith. Might have been the mayor at this point. Um, but they let us put the camera on the um kind of like
this gazebo thing. I don't know exactly what you call it, but it was uh at the
uh at the pier, the municipal pier. Um,
and it had a good view kind of looking down the beach. And um, that was pretty
good as well. Um, and then we went over

I'm just looking through my Twitter here. Uh, not far from Wavelin, working
our way back east, Long Beach, Mississippi. Set a camera up there. Let's see what time this was cuz Nate's closing in. This is 2:41. We have about
10 hours and Nate's going to be there. Um, so we set the camera up in Long Beach and I said on Twitter, "Sorry that it's a little crooked. I guess it was just slightly off horizon. You know, it was just a little unlevel, but it was running and it was in a parking lot um in Long Beach, Mississippi. You know, Long Beach's famous. That's um not far from where Camille made landfall in 1969. Easily 25 ft of surge there. Um,
infamous, right? Big big time hurricane history down there. So, we've got at this point four live cameras. The Mobile

Bay cam um along Highway 98, Highway 90,
something like that, also known as Battleship Parkway. That's in Mobile Bay
looking east. We had the camera in Long Beach. Had the camera in Waveland on the pier. Then we had the fourth cam or I
mean just whatever one of four in Gulfport at the small craft harbor. And
we have the weather stations running. One of them at um I assume we had one. I
just don't have any pictures and I didn't reference it. So maybe we only put one out. Uh and that would be the
one in Buxy, the weather station. Now
we've got to set up the um uh the GoPro

um deal. Right. And I got to figure out when I'm going to do that. Uh where the biggest surge is going to be maybe. And that's really the last task. and make
sure everything's ready for Herby. So,
we went back up to um

Wiggins to the hotel and took a little
bit of a breather. I might have gotten a catnap. Then I started focusing on getting Herby ready. All the while, Nate is strengthening. Um let's see where we
are on the advisories here. Let's fast forward this to the 5:00 advisory. All
right, winds are 90 mph. So, it's getting close to category 2 and I mean,
it's a formidable hurricane. 90 mph hurricane that's strengthening is significant and it's going to put a pretty decent surge in there. Uh, might as well save this picture as well. This will be number 31 just to keep the timeline of how everything was going intact. Uh, and then we're going to, yo
know, we're going to be ready here. We're going to be ready for landfall. Uh, and I figured, let's go back down with all of our stuff. We got the GoPro cam. Still need to put that out. Um, we
got the Herby stuff. Let's go down and hang out at the Hampton Inn right in Golfport along I 10. There's like a Texas Roadhouse there. It's a shopping center. Uh, there's like a Buffalo Wild Wings now. There's a Home Too Suites there. Everything's grown up there a lot since Katrina. And um, I have stayed at that Hampton Inn and we'll just hang out in the lobby. There's going to be some media there and you know, we're not lording or getting in the way, but we'll just just kind of use it as a little base camp deal. You know, an outpost is
a good way to put it. And then Mitchell Saccados would come over from University of South Alabama and join us that evening. All right. So, uh, before we do
a break here, um, I'll save one image.
This is from the weather station over Beluxy Bay. So, I'm just assuming that I
did not put one in Gulfport at the small craft harbor because doesn't seem to be any mention of it. And if there is a mention later, yeah, we'll throw it in there. Um, but this is, you know, late afternoon, mid-after afternoon, however you look at it. 3:16 p.m. local time.

And, uh, yeah, let me save the image before I forget. Save image as. This is
number 31. and uh a screenshot right off
the um the app, the hurricane impact
app. And here it is. Weather Station 1, Buxy Bay, Mississippi. Latl long's on there. And um
3:16 Eastern, well, Central time at 16:16. Everything's done in Zulu, but whatever. It is at 3:16 p.m. Central
time, and the wind is 32 mph. That's the
1 minute average. And then just think about that for a second. 32 mph is your
average wind over one minute. That's not
nothing. It's a constant blow. And so
that water, I mean, obviously this is coming off of Buxy Bay or whatever it is, but the Mississippi Sound is even more exposed, the Gulf more than that.
And the surge is building. That is the
process. You know, that onshore flow.
The average wind is 32 mph. You know,
again, it doesn't take as much wind as people think to do stuff. The gust was
39 miles per hour. That is the singular
highest wind reading in that 60 seconds.
That's how we have our little computer, the program. That's how it does everything. And then the air pressure is 1,04.92
millibars. So that's at 3:16 p.m. And um

we are just about ready to go. So, we'll
do a quick little break here and uh when we get back, it's time to prep Herby,
get the payload ready. Boy, have I got a great picture of that. And we've got to
get that GoPro running for the first time, the first attempt at having some kind of a backup that would actually set the precedent here for the future.

[Music]

[Music]

Heat. Heat.

[Music]

All right, continuing on now. Stories from the hurricane highway. We are up to October 7th, 2017.
Hurricane Nate, 90 mile per hour hurricane closing in on the coast of Mississippi with a landfall late overnight uh Sunday into Monday, 7th
into 8th of October there. And we're ready. We have four live cameras and uh
let's review that. We got Mobile out on
98, 90, whatever it was, Battleship Parkway, I guess. And we have the
weather station in Buxy, right over Beluxy Bay. And that thing is cranking, by the way. It is doing fantastic. We have a live cam in Gulfport at the small craft harbor and it's looking back towards Highway 90. So, it's kind of looking north. And uh the Mississippi Sound there starting to really jump up. And then we have a Long Beach camera. And then we have one in Waveland over on the pier over there. And everything is working great. Now I have to get a brief
nap. Not right now, but you know, back then. and um get things ready to uh

launch the Herby, the weather balloon. But the nap was really going to help. I had to just kind of reset my brain, tune everything out, mute my phone, 30
minutes, 45 minutes, something like that. Just a reset. It really is. It's so important, and I'd be ready to go. And uh so I went back to the hotel there in Wiggins and um got a quick nap. Let's
see what time that was because I tweeted about it. Uh 5:38 p.m. I said Herby

ready to go. Last minute siesta before we send it up up and away. So I'm going to save this picture. Not of me taking a nap, of course, but of Herby ready to go sitting there on my bed. Uh the little yellow payload there. Both of the GoPro cams. One that'll look
kind of down and out and one that'll look straight up at the balloon. And we have the little weather sensor on there. It's this tiny little thing sticking out. Um there is the APRS transmitter.
It's called the weather bug. And uh it's
ready for all intents and purposes. Carrie's got the helium. And we just need the opportunity to do this. So uh
save that picture for you. Got a quick nap and then we're good. And now look,
because we knew it was going to be dark when we would attempt this. I thought
and and here's one of the biggest reasons why I green lit. You know, what do they say? Like all systems go. Yo got a green light, all that stuff. Well, that's my decision here. And I gave it all systems go pending where it makes landfall, how the eye is, and whatever. I mean, we're 80% go, put it that way. Um, I think he even tweeted that at some point, but we we were just a couple of days past full moon. And that being the

case, um, at 11, 12, 1:00 in the
morning, you know, whatever, overnight, the moon was going to be up and pretty much straight overhead, only a couple of days past full. So, it was going to be pretty bright out there overall above the hurricane, above Nate. And remember, the balloon goes up through the eye. Um,
this is if things go according to plan into the stratosphere and hopefully to
100,000 ft. That's the goal. And the

moonlight should shine on everything and
be beautiful to look at from that high up. You know, I was kind of excited about that. the darkness was not as daunting, you know, like, all right, well, hopefully this almost full moon will make it all worthwhile. So, I was, you know, increasingly excited about all this. And, um, Mitchell Sicadoo came

over. He's now there. We all rendevoused
back down in Gulfport. And one of the
last things that I had to do, and I don't have an idea of exactly when I did this, but uh I think it was because it was pretty secret. Um I just wanted to
make sure it would work before I made a big deal out of it. Um and part of it
was just, you know, proprietary, like, all right, you know, I don't want everybody to know everything we're doing until we do it and then we can say we were the first or what have you. But that was the GoPro. Um, at some point on
that day there, October 7th, I put the
GoPro out. Uh, I think Carrie assisted
me. I mean, I might have done it by myself. Maybe Todd helped me. I don't remember exactly when cuz like I said, there was no mention of it, but that's neither here nor there really. Uh, but I did. I put the GoPro out and it's in a case just like everything else. A little bit bigger than a lunchbox. It's got this little external battery in there with it. And I had set it on um I think

one frame every 5 seconds if memory
serves that it would take a picture. So it was interval recording basically
time-lapse mode. Now these fancy GoPros
that we've got they can do they'll make a movie out of the time lapse automatically. This was like a Hero 3 or
4 for goodness sakes and now we're up to
like 13 or something. Um, but anyway, it
would take a picture. I believe it was every 5 seconds. And I got that thing

mounted to just a lamp post um right

next to the roadway, pretty close to the main office there of
the harbor master, not not far from George's office, heading out to the Yuri Pier, small craft harbor, what have you.
And so it was kind of close to Highway
90. So like if you come out to the Yuri Pier, small craft harbor, and you start driving out there and you go past the
main building there, there's like a pavilion on the right and they have concerts there and whatever. Probably weddings for people that do that out there. Um, and then you have the big office there. There's some bathrooms and you go up and you pay your rent for the boat slips and you know the road kind of winds around and then there's a traffic circle. They re-engineered all this in the wake of Katrina. A lot of federal money went in to help and the place was bustling and uh very very much back.
They really upgraded it. And so it's along the side of that road. Um just a lamp post uh you know pretty sturdy. and

I fastened the case on there. I think
Todd is the one that helped me now that I think about it deeper. Um, we went out
there towards evening, like just the late part of the day, something like that. And it was time to do it, time to set this thing up. There'd be less people driving
out there to mess with it cuz it wasn't going to go really high. We put it about as high as we were, five or six feet up. Fastened it on there. this little bracket that goes underneath it to support the weight. Um, we were using zip ties. We hadn't quite discovered the ratchet straps, the spring-loaded ratchet straps. That comes basically a year later. We'll get to all that in the next season of this here podcast. But,
uh, we got it running and, um, I remember I set the GoPro up and got
everything running in the Tahoe. Uh, got

the settings right. One frame every 5 seconds. Hit record. And you can see
every 5 seconds the red light would blink. Blink. 5 seconds goes by. Blink.
And you know that it's taking pictures every 5 seconds. So I kind of waited for
a minute or two. Got all the stuff ready. The chain cuz I'm going to lock it down. Everything's ready. The the zip
ties. And you can see it in the box. The red light. Pretty bright. Blink. Yo know, 5 seconds. blink. So, minutes go by while we get ready to go put it out there and it's still blinking every 5 seconds and it it worked. It basically
ran for 10 minutes there while we were setting it up and it's still blinking, right? So, that's important because yo don't want stuff to fail obviously. And I just, you know, like this there was a lot writing on this experiment. There
really was. I wanted this to work and and be able to be the beginning of a new
way to record what happens in hurricanes because we desperately needed that in the wake of Irma. So, the GoPro cam's running, doing its thing. One picture every 5 seconds. Great. We also had um

running in the Tahoe and I don't remember how I mounted it. uh might have
used like a cargo bar or something and

had it vertical. Uh cargo bars are those
you put it in the back of your pickup truck and they expand and then you can like either with a little mechanism kind
of wench it out and it gets tighter and tighter or sometimes you turn them like
screws. It's it's hard to explain, but it's a way to keep your cargo from shifting. And pretty much everybody uses them horizontally in their pickup truck to secure cargo. It's why it's called a cargo bar. The one that I had, um, I don't remember where I got it, why I got it. Maybe I didn't even have it at this point, but but the bottom like what I'm getting at is we had this Nescam running uh
experimentally as well um in the Tahoe

and I think that was like the day of landfall. We ran that and the Nest uh

ecosystem had an account and everything and on the back end of it you can go in and get a
public um link and you can share that
with anybody. So if you're having a party or you want your family to see the Nest Cam while you're out of town or whatever the case may be, great. Google has where you can do that. But it also has embed code where it's like uh
webpage code that you can put that in a web page and then people can just watch the neescam embedded into a web page.
And one way or the other we had this thing running on our backend on the hurricane track insider site. Don't remember if it was just a link or if we had it embedded in there or what. Um but
you know it was a test. Let's see how well this Nest Cam does just inside the truck as a vehicle cam. And um we also
had the YouTube live running as well. Um
so testing a lot at this last opportunity here of 2017 and we needed

to know what can we use for next year and what's going to work, what doesn't, what do we need to where do we need to go from here after Nate has come and gone. But we still have to get to the
gone part. it's coming and we got to get through it and you know once it leaves and we collect our stuff we see how we did then we can assess and go from
there. So I am very very excited about

all this. Everything's running. Um we got a couple different people out there again helping us in Gulfport at the small craft harbor. The cams are doing great. Nate's closing in. Nighttime's coming. Um and we're we're ready. We're

hanging out at the uh Hampton Inn up
there on I 10. Everybody's there. Uh
Carrie and Todd are there in their truck
and in Carrie's truck. Mitchell is hanging out with me. Weather station still cranking right along. Um and let's
see what time this was. Nothing earthshattering I said by any means, but we have 36 miles per hour on the weather station at Buxy Bay. Pressure was 1,000
millibars. This was at 8:06 p.m. local
time. So, we're only about 3 hours until landfall. Um, and I'm just kind of going through some of these pics here. Um,

down at the uh Gulfport Small Craft Harbor. Uh, I don't know if you'll be able to see it. I'll save the picture regardless. Uh, this is picture number 33, by the way. Uh, it's a screen grab
from the golfport cam and the water is

starting to lap over the curb of the

main road that comes out there and yo know it's dark obviously the hurricane's coming coming quick. I think it was moving at like 25 mph. It was hauling.
Uh, and there was somebody sitting over there to the left. If you look at the picture full screen, you can see a vehicle over there and we were sitting, this is funny, we were sitting in the Hampton in hanging out in the lobby cuz
our work until herby time is done.
There's nothing for us to do out in it.
That's pointless. It's dark. Doesn't have some crazy eyewall and we don't need to be out there anyway. That's what the cameras are for. So, we're going to be comfortable and we're going to completely focus on launching that weather balloon. So, we're hanging out in the Hampton Inn in the lobby. Quite a few people in there, some media, so forth and so on. And they have the weather channel playing. And on the Weather Channel, they had somebody streaming live from the small craft
harbor from their vehicle and that was on the Weather Channel. Um, and they

were talking. I don't know who it was, which chaser it was, but we saw it on TV. We heard their interview and you can see their cam shot from their vehicle and you can see the person in our shot
from the camera. So, that's what I said on Twitter. I said, "The fella on the Weather Channel right now is the car on the left in my camera shot in Gulfport."
Classic. because I thought, dude, eventually, and this is where I was really excited about this, there's a few chasers out there and they're streaming on their various platforms, whatever, probably YouTube mostly back in 17. And

uh, you know, they're doing their work. I'm not bismerching them, but I thought, you know, soon enough the surge is really going to jump up four, five, six feet and you guys are going to have to leave. and my camera, our camera, our
project's camera, um, it won't have to
leave and we're gonna we're gonna
capture this. So, I thought that was funny, you know, like, all right, you're there now, but you just wait. And, um,
moving on along. Uh, getting close. Oh,
by the way, this is funny, too. Um there
was a dude named Madison who earlier in the day
um at Chick-fil-A there in Gulfport.
This is this is funny. He said uh talk to you. He tweeted at me. Let's see what time he did this. Madison said this at
9:42 that night. Everybody's hunkered down. I wondered by the way where are all the people that were here for the Coastal Classic car show, whatever it's called. Where'd all those people go? Cuz
this is uh well, I guess it was late Sunday. I guess it was over and a lot of people left early. So maybe it didn't end up as bad after all. Luck favored
that situation, right? But anyway, um
this was uh so I'm trying to get my
dates. This is Saturday into Sunday, I guess, not Sunday into Monday cuz Chick-fil-A is not open on Sunday. Um so
let me just make sure I have my dates right here. Uh, so yeah, this is Saturday the 7th into Sunday the 8th.
I probably said Sunday into Monday a couple times earlier. That's incorrect. It is in fact Saturday, October 7th. So
yes, in fact, the coastal thing is still very much going on. And I guess a lot of people still left early, but whatever. So we went to Chick-fil-A. All of that notwithstanding uh getting my dates right here, the exact day of the week. It's important because again Chick-fil-A didn't open on Sunday. Um, we went to Chick-fil-A or I did in the Tahoe earlier in the day, Saturday. And this guy Madison tweets at
me Saturday night. Talked to you in the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A earlier. Thanks for the great shots and videos. I appreciate it, man. Um, he was one of the people that worked there. Saw the Tahoe. We did have the logo on there and the hurricanetrack.com on the back. It wasn't the fancy Tahoe with all the stuff on it, but nevertheless, and that was just kind of neat, you know, that somebody remembered and they were following and watching and, you know, interacted with me like that on social media. That that that was cool. Uh, nevertheless, here we are. It's uh close to 9:30. A great radar shot I'm going to save for you. And now that I have my dates exactly right, it's getting close to 9:30 here on Saturday night, um the

7th of October. And check out this radar
shot, Nate, approaching the coast. It's
kind of uh hollowed out on the southwest side as the trough is interacting with
it. It's accelerating. It's going to lose its tropical characteristics, but it still has a pretty good semicircle, a crescent of hurricane force wind. Um, it

has been pushing all of that hurricane force wind 90 mph plus across the open
Gulf, racing towards the landfall there
somewhere between Pasigula and Gulfport.
And if you look on the radar scope shot that I saved for you, you can see our location. I say our cuz it is. It's myself, it's Mitchell, Carrie, and Todd all waiting in Gulfport being very patient. Um, so as we move along, um,

now it is, let's see what time it is.
We're getting some, uh, tropical storm force wind coming into the region. It's 10:49, so almost 11:00. And our weather station at at Baluxy Bay
35, gusting to 46, the pressure down to 995. I'll save this image as well. These
are just there's they're just worthy of saving. Uh historic, right, for posterity. So, the weather station doing great. All the cameras are running and we are getting more and more anxious and
excited to be able to launch Herby. Our
good friend Bruno, Tim Bruno, he's tuning in. Um I don't remember where he was in 2017. and he might have been in Kentucky working with UPS back then. Not

exactly sure, but uh we got we got a a
lot of people pulling for us and um we're looking at the cams and I I tweeted some of the screenshots from them. Mobile uh some surge coming in on
Highway 98 there in Mobile. Uh we're

now, let's see what time this was. Uh,
let's see. Gusting to 50 mph.
And this tweet was, come on. Uh, 11:14

p.m. pressure going down. Just lots and lots of posts of, uh, the weather station. And I was very proud of it. I mean, it was real time, kicking butt, doing great. 39 miles per hour, gusting to 51. We're getting close to midnight here. Uh, 37 gusting to 56 is another
post. Um, and then here's a picture. I'll just save this for you. Um, couple of dudes from Houston from the ABC station had come over to do some reporting. I'll save this picture. This is 11:37
p.m. I don't know who these guys are, but they were all smiles. And uh, there they are from ABC13. I saved that for you as well. And uh,
uh, sustained tropical storm force now. Beluxy 41 mph gusting to 50. So, yo

know, it's coming. We're about 30 minutes away at this point hopefully
from launching the balloon, maybe right from Gulfport. Now, that would have been awesome. And um uh I tweeted that at uh

11:43 p.m. Um all kinds of people
responding back. They're very excited about all this. And on top of everything, the weather station just absolutely kicking butt and taking names. All the cameras are killing it.
Especially the two closest to us there
in Mississippi. The Gulfport cam over there at uh the small craft harbor uh
was remarkable. Big waves coming in. Uh
all the chasers that were out there, a couple people drove out there in like a big old looked like a monster truck. some big stormchaser trucks from Tornado Alley that have the big bright lights. Looks like something from out of a movie. And um you know, they're streaming on their YouTube probably or whatever, Facebook live. And they had to bail. They had to get out of there cuz the water was all the way in and um
inundating everything. Um the lights were still on. I ask George to not turn off the power out there just this one time. You know, like he's like, "All right, we'll leave it on for this so we can see everything." Normally they shut the power off out there from the small craft harbor office. And I asked him, "Could you please leave the lights on so we can see everything?" And he figured, "What the heck?" You know, it's the last hurricane of the year. Hopefully, might as well. Um, but everything is just, I
mean, perfect. Everything's running perfect and uh we're getting 55 gusting
to 66 pressure down to 986 millibars.

This was at 12:10 a.m. on Sunday,

October the 8th. Now, I'm going to save this image. This is a keeper for sure. Picture number 37. Um 55 mileph average

wind. That is your sustained wind. And
then 66 mph gust pressure at 986

very very close to the pressure of Nate
at this point. And let me look at the graphics archive of Nate so I can catch up to where we are at the 10 p.m. advisory package. Winds were down to 85
moving north at 20. So still a solid

category 1. Um, and then about an hour
or so later, uh, still 85 and it's
making landfall at this point, um, as an
85 mph cat 1 north at 20. And it is

making landfall there, right in central Mississippi, just to the east of Gulfport. Might as well save this image for posterity as well. Uh, picture
number 38. There you go. And it is

pretty much time for us to go. and to
get into position the team uh before I
did like right before we left the hotel to get out just a few miles east and I and that's by the way why we stayed at that hotel in the lobby just hanging out is that we were right there on I 10 and we could jump east easily. There would be very little traffic obviously with a hurricane coming. It's very wide. We're not going to have to worry about any surge. The trees are far away. We don't
have to drive 80 miles an hour. Yo know, we can do so safely navigating through the northern eyewall, what's left of it, of category 1, Hurricane Nate. But right before we did that, um
at um 12:22 a.m. Central time, the weather station
picked up a gust to 75.4 mph. Sustained

wind was 57.8 and the air pressure, I'm saving this as well, 38. image. I'm sorry, 39. Um, the
air pressure was down to 984.63
and we were very, very like this was thrilling just this victory. Yes, it's a category 1, you know, it's not the same
as a major hurricane, but it really was
a big deal, you know, that we were able to do this. Uh, pressure finally bottomed out at 982.84. I think that was the lowest. Now, we
caravanned out there. Mitchell rode with me. Carrie and Todd were in his truck.
We left in the eyewall. What was left of
it? It was rocking and rolling pretty good. Nothing I haven't experienced before. Not even close. But still, yo know, we're probably probably driving 50 mph going east on Interstate 10. And
just like I said, there shouldn't be much traffic and there wasn't. And we
get out to Diabraville, which is where Interstate 10 and 110
intersect. And there's a big shopping center up there now. There was then car dealer, few hotels, restaurants. There's
an outback up there. Been to it many times over the years, of course. If yo go south at that interchange, you go down into Beluxy. Keiesler Air Force Base isn't far away. and uh all the casinos, which by the way, a couple of
the chasers, I think, including Reed Timmer, uh Mike Ty, they were down in this parking garage in Beluxy filming
the surge blowing in through there. That was all crazy. I remember that. I remember them uh on social media, people talking about it, how wild it was. And all the lights were on cuz everything's on generator down there and so forth. And those were some pretty wild scenes cuz the water came up anywhere from 4 to 6 feet above the ground. And of course, all of our cameras captured all of that. Very dramatic. But now, uh, the center
of Nate, the eye, is just about over

Beluxy and Diabraville, and we want to be in it. It's It looks like a crescent. It's not the the classic doughut shape, and if it was, it would be a lot more intense, obviously. But it's go time. We are going to do this the first time in all of human

history. All right? And I know that sounds pretty magnanimous or hyperbolic, but it's true. The first time ever, for

the first time ever, somebody us

balloon with GoPro cameras on it. And
that's the key here because to be very clear, weather balloons with sounding
devices have been launched in hurricanes before. I believe they did one in the
eye of Gloria in 1985
from a weather service outpost or whatever it was at Chika Makamako, I think is what it's called on the Outer Banks. And I'm sure there have been other instances. I know in 2014, Weather
Service Bermuda launched a weather balloon in that eye, but they don't have cameras on them. That's the point. This would be the first time that somebody would be launching a payload with cameras. And you know, we had the little weather station on there, the Flight Eagle computer that would measure barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and due point. And uh we could track all that live. Um, and that's the other part is this was live the data so
that the public could track it using APRS. Nobody's ever done that before and
we were going to do it. So, we pull up
there. Uh, the power was still on. Um,
category 1, they did pretty good at putting everything back together after Katrina. So, the power was still on, which was good. Um the eye is coming over and the air was thick, warm, kind

of misty, very very little wind and it
was time. And so we pull off to the right. There's no traffic at all. The occasional truck would come by. That's about it. And we got everything ready. We lined everything up. The helium tank unscrewed the top off of it. Got all the things ready to go. everything tied off to inflate the balloon and get ready to launch this thing into the stratosphere.
Lots of people watching on our live cam. Uh we had the nest cam set up. I angled it somewhere in the back of the Tahoe. That's This becomes something funny later. I remember I angled the nest cam. It's got this little magnet thing on there. I attached it to something and just kind of jimmied it up there so people could see what we were doing as if they were sitting in the back of the Tahoe. That was the cool thing about the Nescam, by the way, is it has this long cable, so you can kind of do what yo need with it and this little bulbous shaped deal to the uh you know, the way it was designed and this magnet thing. And anyway, everything was ready to go.
And I recorded and posted a video uh to

Twitter of all of this. And I'm going to play the audio for it right here. and uh then we'll come back and go through the exciting launch of Herby into the eye of
Hurricane Nate. All right, so Markith here 12:30 Eastern time, October the 8th, we are launching a weather balloon Herby into the eye of
Hurricane Nate. Todd helping Mitch
coming over from Alabama to help out. It is dead calm. Dead calm. And we're making history here. Hopefully this will work. It is definitely filled enough it'll burst below 100,000. That thing's not going to have any trouble getting off the ground. So, just
a few minutes after that, we did it. We
prepped the balloon. We had everything ready. Carrie was there, Todd was there, Mitchell was there, and the four of us worked together to be the first to launch a payload into the eye of a hurricane with a couple of cameras on it and the little weather instrument package that would record some data hopefully to the stratosphere and it was really really exciting. You know, I I tweeted it out. Uh, this is like 12:30,
you know, as I said in the video there, and told whoever was still paying attention up late, you know, it's like 1 something Eastern time. Herby is in the air. It's in the eye of Hurricane Nate.
And I tweeted that out at um 12:33

a.m. And up, up, and away it goes. The
spot locator was doing great. And by the
way, there's going to just be a lot of different images and pictures that I'm going to save here. Some of them are going to come right off of Twitter because they're in that chronological order of when I might have posted them as it was happening. What do they call that? Live tweeting. But some of the pictures are also going to come from my portable hard drive uh from the iPhone
that I was using back in the day. Remember, I've told you a few times over all these episodes that I save everything off my iPhone from time to time. Whichever one I've got now, it's all on Dropbox, but there's portable hard drives that have all the content from all the iPhones, it's all there. Everything is saved. And so, some of these photos and images and maps and whatnot will come from that. So, I'm just going to encourage you instead of saying, "Okay, look at picture 39, look at picture 40." the next, you know, 10
or so pictures, they're all going to be related to this and I'll refer to things and just you'll see. Just make sure yo check out the photos and the images and the whatnot cuz some of them are these really cool maps. Uh they're all going to be on Discord and the Patreon post
when this gets uploaded. All right, so
the spot locator that is the satellitebased tracking system. It is a little unit that hikers and mountain climbers use and it works to 29,000 ft

and um it it gives us uh an update. I
think this was set to every 5 minutes.
Uh, but the key is it has to be facing up and uh it only works at 29,000 feet,
but it's uh kind of a backup plan so
that when the payload lands back to Earth after the balloon pops, uh hopefully everything's facing upright and it'll tell us exactly where it is and we go pick it up because it literally gives us the latitude and the longitude. And you know, that's one of the pictures I have saved. So, check that out. Um, and uh, in fact, let me
just make sure I do save it. Uh, and uh,
I know said I wasn't going to label things, but this is like picture 41 or something like that. But they're all there. You'll see there's a nice shot in there of a radar scope showing exactly
where we are in the center of this thing. Um, you know, just I really hope you'll check all this out because this was historic. Nobody had ever done this before. Not like this. Certainly not two cameras and you know it was dark. It's
12:30 at night but the lights are still on. Power wasn't out there in Diabraville Belie at least where we were
the north side of Beluxy. Uh and yo could, you know, see things uh going up. Obviously, we got the payload back. Spoiler alert in case you didn't know that. We did. We got it back. But I'm going to tell you the story behind all that. That's the point of the podcast here. Um, but you know, you see the city lights as everything uh as the balloon
ascends and so forth. But anyhow, back
to real time. Um, another APRS image
because APRS is the amateur radio packet reporting system and it's the amateur radio signal that goes out. It's about a quarter watt transmitter. And once yo get up to altitude, you know, generally above 1,500 ft or so. And then certainly
anything above that, the little transmitter starts hitting repeater sites from amateur radio operators all over the place. They have those receiver towers on their property and it goes
through their internet if they're connected and most of them are certainly. And then it hits the internet at the APRS.fi website. And the call sign for our particular uh identifier was KM4 SES-11.

and I tweeted that out so that anybody could follow along on the APRS website. Wasn't too worried that if somebody tracked it and then they went and tried to pick it up. I thought, you know what, it's too historic. This is cool. Maybe somebody will find it uh and they can give me a call or whatever. It's fine. I just felt like the more people that were aware of this, the better, honestly. So, it's at uh 1,400 m. It's doing great. temperature is already going down at 19 Celsius. So, it's a little under, it's like in the upper 50s Fahrenheit. And um
840 millibars was its height. So, it's a
little uh above 5,000 ft or so, yo know, 1,400 m, right? And um
everything's doing great. It's doing fine. Uh ascending like we thought. And
it's over uh 10,000 ft. I tweeted that.
and it's moving at about 15 mph of
forward motion. This is at 12:42 a.m.
and everything's doing fine. Um, I
posted another picture. Again, I've saved all these, so be sure you check them out. Uh, of the APRS tracking and

it's moving pretty much as I thought it would be. Uh, kind of slow at first because it's in the eye. There's not much wind in there, but it's drifting on on off to the east, east, northeast, something like that. If you look at the picture, you'll see there it is. Old KM4 SCES-11. Um little dots indicating each transmission time from the APRS signal. And um on it goes. And so we started
packing everything up and we had to get ready to figure out where it's going to land. Now, speaking of that, we assumed

that once this got up into the middle and upper level part of the atmosphere, 500 mibars and up, especially at the 200 mibar level up there where jets fly,
that it would start moving northeast at a pretty good clip with the hurricane with Nate. that the overall flow should

I thought take this payload this big
balloon is like you know 15 feet across now up at 10,000 plus feet finally it's
at 18,000 ft and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger because the air pressure is lower on the outside so the balloon is expanding and you know I
figured sure this thing's going to get caught in the upper level flow and it's going to take off to the northeast probably 20 30 40 knots maybe more and
we assumed uh predicted even that it would come down once the balloon burst whenever
that would be 70 80 90 100,000 ft was
the goal that it would be somewhere over interior Mississippi or somewhere over west central Alabama even who knows it could go a long way that's fine we could track it that's you if we got it the next day I didn't care you know and it drifts down with a parachute it's not going to hurt anything and and if it busts somebody's windshield, you know, I'll give them a thousand bucks and we'll fix it. It's not dangerous. Yo know, it doesn't free fall. So, um,
we're tracking it and, uh, all of a sudden, and let's see when I posted this, uh, our first surprise came at us,

and this was at 12:51 a.m. And, uh,
remember to save this picture here for you. Um, we got a little surprise there.
uh the payload had turned southeast and
it was moving faster and if you look at the image there's more space between the dots which means that it's accelerating but it was moving southeast and my tweet was at 18,000 ft our payload has turned
southeast and I can't understand why um
that means it's moving clockwise yo know what I mean it's rotating around like what and you know 18,000 ft is
pretty close to 500 mibar cars and that's pretty close to the steering level overall. It should be moving northeast, but it wasn't right. So, that
was really strange. Um, a little bit uh

further along in time, I tweeted out, "Totally did not expect this track. It's not moving north like Nate. What the heck?" And this was posted at
uh 12:57 a.m. So, it's getting really
late now. Um, we're all up late. I'll save this picture as well for you. And um, it really was bending more and more to the southeast and accelerating headed
toward the Mississippi Sound. And there was a few wise asses on uh, Twitter
saying, you know, you can kiss it goodbye. It's headed for the Gulf. Way to go. You failed. You know, a couple of jack wagons, right? Whatever. Um, but I
was really trying to figure this out. So, the next tweet, um, it's a little a
little bit later. What time is this? Um,
this is about 10 minutes later. It's 1:08 in the morning, uh, central time,
2:00 Eastern. Like, who's still up? A few people. They were watching everything. And, uh, now it's almost at the 200 mibar level. Remember, we could keep track of all of this data through the APRS transmitter. And, um, it is
really hauling to the southeast. and it is almost over the Mississippi Sound.

Um, you know, it's almost cleared the land. So, I'm going to save that picture. All right. So, there's this one here. And just for reference, this is picture 45. The next one, picture 46 is

the 200 mibar um analysis from the GFS that had just
run. And
you know, the arrows, the uh wind barbs are moving southwest to northeast over Mississippi. Not very strong, but still.

And this thing should be going northeast at like 5 or 10 knots or so. But it's
not. It's moving southeast at, you know,
30 or 40 miles hour. And people are asking questions, you know, why is it doing this? I'm like, beat the heck out of me. We'll certainly make the data available so that folks can analyze this down the road. Um, and then at some
point here, this is 1:14 in the morning,
central time, and I said, uh, I believe
that our payload is now above the hurricane. If so, with the bright light of the moon, remember it's, uh, the moon is a couple days just after full moon and it's up high in the sky, the view should be stunning. I mean, I was really hoping those GoPros would pick up uh
especially that high up. It should be a bright top of the hurricane transitioning to extratropical as it may be. Still, I was really excited to see this. I thought, gosh, this is going to be amazing, even at 1:00 in the morning.

So, the balloon burst. Unfortunately, it
did so pretty early at 59,000 and some
change feet. We know this because the APRS suddenly the numbers start going down again and um it's falling back
through some pretty thin atmosphere. Even at 59,000 ft it's pretty thin up there. So it's falling back down.
Luckily it has turned northeast finally
and um the parachute has enacted or enabled or whatever deployed and um it's
about a 3-ft parachute. It's a 1 m parachute and it comes down and it lands

according to the spot locator cuz that starts to fire up again once it gets under 29,000 ft and the APRS all that
stuff suggested it landed in the Moss Point area of Mississippi. So, we are
going to head out to try to go get it.
And the hurricane is still going on. yo
know, it's moving inland, but the tail, this sort of southeast tail on it was still coming in and um it was, you know,

raining and really windy over there in in the Moss Point area. This is eastern Mississippi. And um I was really really tired. All
the adrenaline was wearing off. Uh Mitchell had to head on back to Mobile.
Uh he had class on Monday, I guess, right? And um yeah, so I said, "Well,

let me go back to it. It's 1:00 in the morning. I'm going to go back to Wiggins. I'm exhausted. It's been a long day. I got to get some sleep. Um and
we'll find this payload the next day, you know, later in the day on the 8th." And um uh Sunday the 8th, right? And uh

Carrie of course is like, "Well, we're going to go and see if we can pick it up on the APRS cuz his truck has a big
antenna on it to receive these signals." And so he and Todd, we're going to stay out a little longer, a couple hours, heading towards where we thought it fell and see if he can pick that signal up. And if he can, it'll cuz it's on the ground at this point, it will tell yo exactly where it is. I mean, literally the latitude and the longitude and then you just have to go pick it up. Um, so,

uh, couple problems or whatever. Just a
few things to, um, I guess inform you about about how all this works. The, um, the APRS

works great once it's above a thousand
feet or so. It's got to get up above the trees and all that. And then that little transmitter, quarter watt, starts hitting other amateur radio antenna in

the area. Some amateur radio operators have a little tower. And um now the
power is out in parts of Mississippi, so there might not be too many transmitters running, but I imagine that a lot of these amateur guys have generators. But we've learned over the years of testing that once the payload gets below 1500 ft

or so, especially since it's coming down pretty fast, 20 25 miles hour, um, and

the transmit time between, you know, the

intervals is I think ours was set for 2
minutes. And even if it was 1 minute,
that's a long time if you think about it, how long one minute really is. If
you have to hold your breath, you're waiting for news about something like a minute can be a long long time. And I
don't mean a sports minute like college basketball where that minute can drag out and be 15 minutes. You know what I'm saying? That's a long time. A lot of distance can be covered. And during that minute, you know, you may have a transmission and it gives you the latl long and it's like right over Moss Point or near Pasigula or something. 60
seconds later, it could be on the ground. You understand? And so you have to hope that the interval time between,
you know, the transmissions is such that the last transmission it was really close to hitting the ground. Even a few hundred feet up could be very helpful. Anything above a,000 ft and it's like, oh, you start broadening your landing
zone, the LZ, right? And then you say, "All right, well, that's why you have the spot locator because once it's on the ground, the APRS, you've got to be within like a half a mile of it ideally,
and then carries a truck would pick it up or a handheld radio might pick it up. Um, but the spot locator would take over
cuz that's uh satellite based, but it
had to be facing up towards the sky. Uh,
even an angle is fine, but it can't be sideways and it certainly cannot be upside down or it will not talk to the satellites in Mars or whatever the heck it is. Um, and you're not going to get the signal. So, we got all these transmissions coming from APRS and spot
and then boom, no more. And we realize, well, well, that's it. It's on the ground somewhere near Moss Point. And you can deduce just kind of, you know, take the lines of where it was going and extrapolate where it probably landed. And we assumed it was Moss Point. But it's 1:30 in the morning, whatever. Hurricane is still going on, you know, tropical storm winds, southwesterly flow
coming in there, raining hard. And I was like, forget that. I'm going to go to bed. Wherever it landed, it's not going
anywhere unless it landed in the water and it's going to drain away. and like what am I going to do at 1:00 in the morning? Seriously, let me get some sleep and during the day Sunday, uh
we'll go out and we'll put a big concerted effort into finding this thing because look, you know, we got to get it back. It's almost a full moon. The GoPros are on there. Hopefully, they ran. They should have. We've tested it for 5 years and everything's worked out
every single time. Um 59,000 ft up.
That's pretty good. We got some good data from the Flight Eagle computer that's all recorded every 6 seconds. There's good data. Yeah, we're going to make sure we catch this thing, right? And we go get it. But I wanted to get some sleep and we'd head out sometime uh
once we're all well rested there during the day on Sunday. [Music]

So we are now up to Sunday, October the
8th, 2017. Nate has come and gone, dissipated over
the southeast United States. pretty big rain maker, pretty disruptive in Mississippi, sizable storm surge, all that stuff. Um, and we're going to retrieve our cameras and we'll talk about all the camera stuff. And the GoPro, how did that do? We're going to address all of that. I'll get to that, but first, our biggest priority here is
to find the Herby payload. I got back to
Wiggins to the Hampton Inn at a little
after like 5:30 in the morning exhausted
after a very long day there the 7th into the eighth and uh got a few hours of sleep. Um and then I got up and met up
with Carrie and Todd and it was time to
go and uh we were working with people on
our back end. We have this chat that we had called the Cbox. We're texting with people, Bruno and Paul and uh Delaware

Steve, our good friend Steve Sereno. Yo know, we're trying to work on all of this together to solve. All right, what is the LZ? What's the landing zone for this? What is the potential area that we're looking at? And you know, like
what went wrong? Why isn't the spot locator talking to us? cuz that was
seemingly the fail safe is the spot locator because it talked via satellite
and it would update every 5 minutes or something like that and it would run for like 10 days. But again, the real key to
that thing working, the spot locator must be upright, meaning that the payload had to be upright. So, we were assuming that it was upside down somewhere, and that's why we weren't hearing from Spot. So, the plan was to
get out during the day and try to use Carrie's truck and the higher powered
receiver antenna on his truck to listen
to the APRS transmitter uh coming off
the payload, pick up the signal. And we've done this many times in all of our testing since 2012 when we came up with this idea. And we just had to get within about a half a mile of it. Maybe a little closer since it could be on the ground somewhere. Maybe down in some thicket or something. Uh, who knows? I mean, it it could be in some water, maybe. I mean, looking at some of the maps and how it was coming in. There was a chance that it could have landed just in the water. Um, like one of these lakes or something close by to Moss Point. A lot of bodies of water down there. Not in the Gulf. It was not in the Gulf. It was not in the Mississippi Sound. But there's other medium to largesized bodies of water. Uh
some bayou or something that it could have landed in. Absolutely. Could have been on the edge. I mean, who knows? Uh but we felt like let's just drive around some of these streets and we'll be listening for it. You know, I had my handheld radio. It was a Kinwood. Uh
Carrie had the Kinwood larger receiver.
Um and he you had Todd with him. And so
we just went around listening, you know, waiting for the radio to pick up the squawk, this very distinctive squawk
that is the data coming through. And it would show up right on the LCD screen, KM4 SCES-11. That's the identifier. And it would tell you if you leaf through the different pages on the screen. It'll tell yo exactly where it is, the latitude and longitude, your distance from it, and the bearing. like it's giftif wrapped,
but you have to hear it, you know, yo got to pick it up on the radio. That's the problem. So, we got out there. It's
hot as all get out. Believe it or not, it was it was toasty down there still muggy. The sun is out. It's all wet from
the hurricane coming through. And we drove around generally where we thought it might be. Um, I put the Phantom 3
quadcopter up the drone to take a look
around there. Nothing, you know. Uh, we
were because you can see the video right there on the phone. We then downloaded the actual video in in 4K or whatever it was and played it on the laptop to see if we could see it on a bigger screen. And we were coming up empty. And um, yo know, a few people were asking very valid questions. How come you can't find this thing? I thought you said it had built-in GPS. I said, 'Yeah, it absolutely does. Uh, but it's not military accurate where it's going to tell you down to the I don't know how accurate military is, but um it's
relative, you know, and and you still have to go look in the general area, so you can pick up that signal. Plus, the spot locator was probably upside down. And so, there was just reasons, very valid reasons. Looked like this time we might have uh met our match and we might not find it. So we spent all day that

Sunday driving around all kinds of
different streets and areas, you know, residential areas, big thoroughares, whatever in the Moss Point region next to the water. I mean, we crisscrossed pretty much anything we could come up with to try to find this thing. And uh
we couldn't, you know, we weren't hearing the signal and that was really frustrating. This is the longest it had ever taken us by far to locate a payload
after we had launched one of our test flights, for example. Um, and some
people were thinking maybe it's in the water. I was like, "No, I don't think it's in the water." If you look at the trajectory that it was taking, how it was coming in. I think it's somewhere in
Moss Point, somewhere near I 10, um, and

the main highway that comes south of out of off of I 10. It has to be within a
mile of that area. One square mile.
That's a still that's a big area. That's 5,280 feet in pretty much any direction

from where you're standing. I know it doesn't quite work like that, but yo know, it's a mile this way, a mile this way. It's a square mile, right? Uh it's
5280* 4 in, you know, all directions. Um

I mean, you know what a square mile is. And that that's daunting when you have trees and buildings cuz remember when we did our testing over the years, we always did it out in the Midwest where it was pretty easy cuz there's very few trees, there's fields and a grid. This
was hard. So, we get through the first full day and we came up short. And uh
I'm going to save this picture. This is neat. Uh 7:47. It's actually 6:47 p.m. Mississippi time. And uh this is picture number 47.
It's the sunset and um it's kind of dark
out there because there was some power out so you don't see much in the way of billboard lights, street lights, that kind of thing. But it was a beautiful sunset in the wake of Nate. and um we

gave up for the day. But there was
still, now we're going to get to the GoPro thing, the matter of the GoPro.
And I needed a day to go by anyway for the officials down at um the small craft
harbor in Waveland. You know, we still
had to go collect the cameras, right? So, we were going to do that later in the evening there on that Sunday, the 8th. So, we gave up looking for Herby
and uh went back and started picking up equipment. And um this next picture that I'm going to save, uh this is an important one. This is really, really neat. This is picture number 48. And this is uh 7:00 down at the small

craft harbor. Uh, and that's a picture
of the camera unit itself that had the

GoPro in it on the light pole. Uh, and

if you take a look at this, um, it's
pretty low. I mean, it's like you could just walk right up to it and help
yourself. Like, it's got a bungee cord and a zip tie on there. It's got a nice chain and it's locked. Um, but
otherwise, I mean, it probably wouldn't have taken much. And I don't even think the case itself was locked just looking at it. I mean, all you had to do is cut the zip tie off and take the bungee cord off and you could open the case and steal the GoPro. Luckily, nobody did that. I was very excited to see this. I
thought, well, let me look at the um thousands of images that hopefully the time lapse recorded, and that'll at least give me something while we're waiting to find Herby here. Uh, but there's a picture of that thing. So, make sure you check that out. That's the GoPro unit, and boy, what it what it
captured. It was really amazing. Um,

so, uh, people are asking, did you find it? And I said, no, not today. We don't even have a signal coming from it, unfortunately. And um we collected the cameras. That
was not too difficult. Long Beach, the Gulfport cams, you know, the GoPro and the Ustream cam out there, the Logitech. Went over to Waveland, grabbed the camera off the pier over there, jump on I 10, and you can zip back east pretty easily. Um I don't remember when we got Mobile. I think that was later because that's a little bit farther to the east and you're just burning time doing that, but the camera was sitting there presumably like whatever, we'll get it later. So, now we got to go back out and
we're going to keep working on this. Um,
and uh it's pretty darn late at night
and uh let's see what time this was.
12:20 in the morning now cuz it took a few hours to go around Mississippi getting everything. And we pulled into like a Waffle House parking lot somewhere on the Mississippi coast there strategizing trying to figure out where we're going to look for the weather balloon now on
uh Monday the 9th of October. You know, that's our next big thing. We got to find this thing. Seriously. So, I'm going to save this picture. It's just uh it's just a a blah picture, right? It's a waffle house. Like whatever. But that's life on the road. That's, yo know, we're me, Carrie, Todd. We're, yo
know, I'm in my Tahoe. He's in the truck there with Todd and we're trying to figure this thing out. I think they were going to stay out a couple of hours and keep um looking uh for the the signal.

Um and I was going to go back up to Wiggins. I think we ended up staying there four or five days or something. I don't know. It kept extending. I need another night. I need another night. But I went up to Wiggins again. It's about 45 miles north. Um and I don't remember.

Maybe I eventually moved to a hotel down
there in Gulfport. I mean, that would honestly make sense because the hurricane's come and gone. Um, you know,
there's no coastal car show or whatever at this point, but yeah, whatever, right? It doesn't matter. It would be nice to know and to to realize, no, I didn't drive back and forth to Wiggins every single day, but maybe I did. Whatever. Nonetheless, I go back to
whatever hotel I was staying in, and I wanted to see what that GoPro captured.

You know, that was really important to me. So, went to the room, took the camera up there with me. It's got the little chip in there. Probably 128 gigabyte chip, honestly, at this point. And uh pop the chip out, put it in the little SD card reader. It's a micro SD card. And uh put it in the laptop. It
does the little bum bum. And you know, the little folder thing opens up. And there were all these images, thousands
of them. the first few kind of funny me

and Todd as we were setting the camera up, you know, the first bunch of them. It's every 5 seconds that a picture was taken. And what's really interesting about this though, I want to try to paint this picture for you before I show
you an actual picture uh that I'll save for you. um on the old Hero4 there when

you did it in time-lapse mode and it's taking a picture every x seconds whatever it was and in this case it was 5 seconds it kind of acted like a DSLR
to some extent and I guess that's what it is um sort of I mean it doesn't have

uh the same mechanism as a DSLR camera
like a digital camera but it is a digital camera in some sense right
coming in it hits the sensor and records that light photons and whatever
and you get an image. However, the magic of all of that works. It's amazing. And
it does so in the picture at some
extraordinary resolution. I don't remember what it was, but it was like these were really large pictures. Um I
would say like at least 3200 pixels by
some other whatever. Like these was these were not little JPEGs. Okay. This was not 720 x 480 or even 1080, yo
know, or 1920 x 1080. These are like 3,200 something if I recall. Really big
picture. So the resolution was nice and
that's why you know these these were it
was going to take a while to process all this. But the other part, not only are these high resolution pictures, but the

exposure time, however the GoPro worked,
um, I didn't monkey with any of the settings because you could do that even on the older GoPros, you know, what is the aperture, what's your ISO going to be, all that stuff. Kind of like a DSLR.
I don't know. I just set it up, hey, 5second interval, go. And, you know, hope it works. And boy, did it work.
What it did is it took like I don't know

almost like a quarter second exposure.
You know what I mean? So instead of uh video which is going by at 30 frames per second and whatever the light you know low light capability is it is what it is. In the picture setting that I was on, by default, it was somehow recording
these pictures, saving these pictures at a decent exposure time of a quarter of a
second, maybe less. But the bottom line, it wasn't just boom, there's a picture. You know what I mean? It wasn't like that fast. It was exposed just a little
bit. Meaning that the quality, the
exposure, the detail was extraordinary. And I didn't plan on
this. So the very first picture that I
tweeted that is the beginning. This is
the start of what is going to be the future of this project that it worked.
This uh picture I put out. I said this is a real frame from my time-lapse cam
from Gulfport, Mississippi last night. The movie will be simply stunning. I said you won't believe your eyes. Cuz I didn't believe mine. And again, this is
at like I'm up so freaking late. It's 2:53 in the morning and I'm still up
messing with this stuff. But I'm going to save this picture here for you. It's literally just a picture of the laptop, I do believe, you know, that I took from the iPhone, like just held it up and took a picture of the screen because the photo itself, like I said, is like giant, like 3,200 pixels at least by
whatever, you know, some ratio. Uh, but
that's picture number 50. And man, oh
man, it was just amazing. like it looked

like a computerenerated I mean now I'm recording this in 2025 July and we have
AI well that was not a thing not like it is now obviously generative AI I don't
even know if it was a concept 8 years ago but this was a real picture was not

Photoshop it was none of that and yo
can tell there's an exposure going on here like it it it exposed the the the
the camera exposed. It's not film, but it was like a quarter second or something because the water has a little bit of motion blur, right? And the
lights are just a little bit brighter. So, it's almost like shutter open, shutter closed or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, you know, a quarter second or half second, I don't know. Clearly, it was an exposure. And that
was good. This was good. This meant the detail was going to be better. And boy
oh boy, it was. and it ran for over 30

hours, uh, recording thousands and thousands of images. And it would take me a while to create a time-lapse movie out of it. I'd have to import everything into Adobe Premiere um, Elements, which is what I use, and uh, you know, make a movie like

one picture at a time. That was going to be a daunting task on a on a laptop that
was pretty good. Carrie had gotten us a couple of good laptops that year. Uh these Dell Inspiron gaming laptops had a
good Nvidia processor in there, yo know, uh graphics card, whatever. Um but
you know, it it was going to be timeconuming. So I had to get some sleep as excited as I was because now uh
coming up on the 9th um we have to find
this thing. Now one thing that we did do I want to go back a little bit that evening there Sunday into Monday. Okay. Part of the reason we were out so late, we drove around, we walked out near the airport. Uh I remember Todd and I
literally walked around on foot holding
up the Kinwood radio hoping to hear that

squawk that the APRS would send out. Uh
this was uh I don't remember the name of that airport. Um it's near Belaluxy and

Moss Point and all that area. Um, but we
were right there near the airport. There was frogs and critters out and you know

the moon now a few days past full came
up really late and it was misty and humid and it was just surreal like here
we are Todd's walking around with me. Carrie was driving around in his truck so you know we're covering more distance and we're trying to pick up this darn thing and um we we weren't having any
luck. Marks out with hurricanetrack.com.
I know you can't see anything. We're uh I'm here with Todd Plet. He's in front of me, believe it or not.

Todd's not making that noise.
That's some kind of creature or creatures as we're walking around near the Trent lot airport. That's the moon.
Listening for that. hoping that it'll be the beacon
for our weather balloon payload.
You can see
that's the APRS channel

and we're just walking out near the runway. That's the runway lights.

[Music] If we can if we can hear the beacon, it'll tell us where the payload is.

And I remember we drove down because Tim Bruno, our good buddy, I'd known him
since he was a a teenager. Um he had
been in the army doing weather balloon launches and uh again I think he was living in Kentucky at this point, but he had drawn up basically where he thought it was just south of I 10 Moss Point
area. I think Highway 603 or something like that. Maybe back behind a Taco
Bell. There's a Hampton Inn over there and then some other lower budget hotel kind of on the edge of some dense pine trees and you can look at the Google satellite and all that. And he kind of boxed off where he thought it was. I think it's in here somewhere. Narrowed it down to a few thousand square feet or
something like that. Right. Quarter mile. Quarter square mile. We'll say uh Delaware Steve chiming in, other people chiming in. And we had the general consensus that it was near the Taco Bell
behind like this quality in or something
uh at this corner. And there's like a little service road. Um let me look at Google Maps cuz I want to make sure I got this right uh as to exactly where we

were looking cuz it was getting late. We picked up those cameras. Moss Point,
Mississippi, if you would. And uh there we go. Um so let's see. Is it 53? Yeah,

it looks like it's Highway 53 that comes down or 63. Sorry, my eyes. It's late.
I'm trying to get this recorded right.
It is the Hampton in Moss Point Pasigula. There's a Taco Bell. It is Highway 63 at Interstate 10. And this
will also tell me about the airport. It is the Trent lot. I was off the tip of
my tongue earlier. We were out there on
um some service road near the Trent lot airport because Bruno had told us he
thinks it's in that area maybe just south of the Trent lot airport uh near that Taco Bell. There's a pilot travel center somewhere at this big interchange at I 10 and Highway 63,
right? He's like, I'm pretty sure that's where it is. Doing math, extrapolation, trigonometry, all that good stuff. So, we were spending a good two hours after
picking up the cameras and everything looking around this area one more time. We got to find it. We got to find it. We got to pick up that signal. Surely the APRS signal we just get close enough. Maybe we got to get to within 500 to a,000 ft because it's down in some bramble in a ditch or something. Like, come on. So, we did. We spent some serious time out there zero zeroing in
on this area. And you come off of uh the
interstate, you got 63 over there, and those are the service road. They call it old highway 63. Hey, my memory is pretty good. It is a quality in Moss Point. I
remember um Todd and I walked around

that motel. There's the Taco Bell, there's a McDonald's, there's the Hampton in and uh we walked all around
there. I even walked up on the second floor with Todd cuz now we're elevated,
you know? Yeah, smart Mark. You're up there 20 ft higher now and the radio's higher and like it's got to be here. And
we came up empty. So that's when I went on back to the hotel again, presumably
in Wiggins, I guess. Looked at the GoPro stuff and I realized, "Oh my goodness, this is incredible." It gave me a little bit of a jolt of energy and positivity,

you know, like all right. And um it's
like 3:00 in the morning, though. I got to get some sleep. Um I did want to put
together, however, some of the pictures and send them to the Weather Channel. And uh cuz you remember, I was still working with them. Um and you know, just I had a lot to do. I had a lot on my mind, but I still had to get a little bit of sleep. So, I got a few hours and
uh Carrie and Todd came on back to the hotel as well. Came up short. They said, "We're going to go back out again when the light comes up and we're just going to keep searching. We're going to go on foot as best we can." Carrie was not as mobile as as Todd was because of Carrie's stroke the year earlier, but you know, he can move around a little bit and keep driving that truck every little nook and cranny, backing it in some alleyway, whatever. Where is this thing? Where's the APRS has to talk to us. We were determined. So, um I slept

in and um got up and I had a text. Let

me see what time I got up. Uh I got up a
little after 11 or so. Slept in pretty good. Uh needed the sleep. A lot of stress. A lot of positive stress, but stress is stress. Working on that GoPro stuff, you know, from the time lapse. like ah it's just so much going on and I
look at my phone after getting up and I had a text from Carrie and it was all caps and it says found it and I was just
like like you found it like the payload
seriously you're not messing with me says yep we got it and uh I said do not
touch it hold tight I'm on my way and
he's like yeah no we're left it right where we found it we're going to sit right here and babysit it until you get here. And I was like, well, where is it? You know, I called him and he said, it's
right where we looked last night, right behind the quality in. We were right there. Walked right by it and it's hanging in some shrubs and crap right next to uh the power lines. In fact, part of the cable, the rope, the tether, and some of the parts of the balloon itself are up on the power line. That was a little disconcerting. Um, and it's just hanging there on this bush and we haven't touched it. He said, "Haven't touched it." I was like, "Oh, okay." So, I jumped in the Tahoe. I tweeted it out, though. I said, "Well, that was like magic. My team just found the Herby payload history. Yay." And I said, "We've located the payload that was launched into the eye of Hurricane Nate, and um, we're going." And and Carrie said that both of the GoPros are on there. They're intact, and we're good to go. So, I race down uh 49 or whatever it
is. Didn't want to get a speeding ticket. Uh get on 10. I head east, jump off of
Highway 63, come around to that service road, pull around the back of the quality in. There's Carrie, there's Todd, there's Carrie's truck, and there it is. There's the payload hanging
inexplicably from one of these branches
uh of an oleander bush. All right, here we are in Moss Point,
Mississippi. This is the payload. Look at that. It's like literally hooked on.
That's crazy.

It's like somebody put it here.
Did you guys put it here? >> Nope. No. It's exactly where we found it. >> Exactly how we found it. No. I mean, we
walked around the stupid
>> party in. Yes, >> we walked around on those balconies.
>> I was like, "Wow, what are the odds?" And I'm going to save the picture. Of course, I got a picture for you. Uh, come on. Load up for me, please. Picture. Um, so I'm going to save this picture for you. This is picture number 51. And I think it is anyway. Yes, it is 51.

Uh, and you can see for yourself. And I get out. I was so excited. I'm looking at it. I took a picture, lots of video of it, whatever. Uh posted that picture on Twitter. People are like, "It didn't even hit the ground." And yo know, other people like, "Yay." And I mentioned, you know, I walked right past this thing at the quality in like it's the back parking lot. What the heck? And
I in all my excitement, I was like, "Wait a minute." Like, it does look odd. Why is it hanging there like that? What are the odds? And if you look at the picture, you'll understand. Like really? And I said to Carrie, I was like, why is it hanging there like that? Did you guys find it on the ground and then put it on that branch? He goes, no, no, we left it exactly as we found it.
Todd piped up. No, that's that's how we found it. That's how we left it. We have not touched it. I was like, that's just really weird, though. It looks like somebody put it there. And they're like, yeah, I know. We were thinking the same thing. you know, maybe they said somebody did find it farther back towards the woods and they hung it there so that we could find it. That's a possibility. I was like, "Oh, okay." So, immediately, um, we take it off the the
oleander bush and, um, we opened it up

and lo and behold, there is the answer as to why, uh, we were not able to hear
it from all of our listening equipment.
A, the spot locator was in fact upside
down, you know, because it is hanging there and it's pointing at the ground, disheveled. Uh B,
this so frustrating. The little battery pack that powers the APRS transmitter,

uh, holds three, I think it is, double A

extreme lithium batteries. It's those silver ones. They're very very expensive uh relative to other batteries, yo know, the uh the in the infoliththium extreme or whatever they are cuz they can survive really cold temperatures and not lose their power or whatever. And that's what you're supposed to put in this stuff cuz it gets cold up there -60 - 80 easily. And these batteries last
through all that. It's amazing. Um,
one of the batteries once this thing hit the ground, and it did hit the ground, we we figured it all out. I'll get to it. When it hit the ground, it popped
one of the little batteries out of the little plastic holder. It's just open. Like, it's a very simple design. And it's just all laying inside the case. And a simple like, oh, we should have thought of this. You know, the battery popped loose. It just popped out. So now the APRS is off. Duh. And simple
electrical tape or a rubber band or zip
tie or something to just hold the batteries in place in this little tray thing uh would have solved that and we would have found it, you know, probably the night that it all happened. But yo know what? It didn't matter. We found it. We got it. So we're ecstatic. We're

absolutely to the moon, as they say. and
um we're ready to see what we got. So, I

got in touch with the Weather Channel, talked to Tom up there, uh the guy that handled anything that I do with the Weather Channel at the time, and uh hey man, I got this, you know, we got the GoPro thing and like this is going to be incredible. I told Jim Canour, I texted
him and they were immediately like, all right, you know, send us what you got. How fast can you get to Atlanta? Jim
wants you on AMHQ either tomorrow, Tuesday, or Wednesday,
the next day, and you know, right here in Atlanta. We don't want to do it remote. We want you here. I was like, "All right, sure. Uh, let me let yo know, you know, as soon as I can." So,
um, we drove over to Mobile. We grabbed
the camera, uh, the Logitech camera off
of Highway 98 over there. Got all our cams back. Got everything back. We got Herby and we went to an outback somewhere um in uh that area. Trying to see where

if it has any um potential like where

this was. Probably somewhere in Mobile.
That would make the most sense, right? Um went to Outback, brought in the laptop and took a look while we were
eating at what we got. the world's first

video going from the surface of the earth to 59,000 ft. In this case, almost
the stratosphere um in the eye of a hurricane. Nobody had
ever done this before and we were the first to ever do it and it worked. Uh I'll save this picture for you. Picture number, what are we up to? 52, something
like that. Uh yes, that's correct. Um

picture number 52. There's the GoPros sitting on the table there at the Outback and uh we looked at the video uh

on the computer and it was just
extraordinary to sit there with Carrie who helped to fund this to help you know
the APRS side of it trained me with the amateur radio stuff. the first launch back in 2012. All the testing. Todd had
been there for some of the testing. And here we are sitting at this outback in
Mobile, Alabama, watching video of this

balloon ascending into the eye of a hurricane. I know it's at night. It's a category 1. It's not like the greatest thing ever, but to us, it was a major
victory. And I could not have been happier. I really, really was just
thrilled that all of this had worked. And so what I had to do from this point on was get my butt to Atlanta. So, uh,

this is Monday and I agreed I'll be in
Atlanta and I'll be on AMHQ the next day, uh, Tuesday the 10th. Uh, of all
the ironies again because one year later on the 10th. Yeah. Well, we'll get to that. And um it worked. Everything
worked. I got there at like 4 in the morning. I was dog tired, of course, cuz even Mobile to Atlanta. That's a haul.
And what time did I post this video on Twitter that I'm looking at here of Carrie and and me looking at everything? This is 3:00 in the afternoon. We finished up. And then I I said I said, "Guys, I hate to just bolt, but I got to go. You know, I got to go." They're like, "Yep, yep. We we understand. Go do your thing. this is all of us. This, yo know, you're going to represent the project, your thing. Go for it. So, we
ate. I hauled butt out of there. Got up to Atlanta. Who knows when I had to be at the Weather Channel at like 4 something in the morning to get everything ready, makeup and all that stuff, get them the video. And um I was
I was on AMHQ with Jim Canour and um I

think maybe what is that? Stephanie Abrams is on there as well. sorry that I can't remember, but I think that's who it was. And we showed the world, yo
know, the Herby video. Uh there was a couple different segments that I was on. Um and then the GoPro video, which and
some of the highlights from the Ustream cameras as well. The extraordinary video from the the surge cam, especially there uh in Gulfport out at the small craft harbor. That was phenomenal. And it when it was all said and done, it
was one of the most successful missions
to date. Now, it certainly helped that
it was only a category 1 at landfall.
However, I think that it really didn't matter. Like, even if it came in at 120 mph, Cat 3, it just would have made all
the effects even more dramatic. All of the equipment worked. Now, we would have put stuff higher, you know, we would have adjusted for all of that. So, I don't think the category really mattered. It made it less stressful. I'm going to be honest with you. It took the weight off a little bit. Uh, but boy,
what would happen a year later? This was this was a good warm-up for that. That's for sure. If only I had known, right? I I know now, and I'll tell you about it in the next season. But, um, we did it. We culminated an incredible year of all

kinds of stuff, you know, into this
extraordinary mission. Uh, ragtag group
of dudes down there. Biggest bunch of nerds you could ever see seek out, right? I mean, really, we're just four guys. Mitchell coming out made it four. Working with a great group of people. People in Gulfport, people in Beluxy. Um, and we pulled off the impossible. We
really did. Like this video, all of it was extraordinary. It really was. Nobody
had ever seen storm surge like this. This was even better than what we accomplished during Hermine the year before. We topped that. The four cameras, all of them ran the full 30 plus hours. The GoPro did its thing. It

did the time lapse. And I thought, "All right, okay. You know, we got something here." and and kind of lost in all of
this. That little nest cam silently
waiting, right? That worked pretty darn well. You know, we kind of kept it in the back of the Tahoe um when we were setting up Herby. Kind of forgot about it and it was just streaming back there and people were watching it on our insider site and commenting on the Sabbox uh like it's in the trunk. So, they called it trunk life. They put a little hashtag on our Seabbox, # trunklife, you know, like yo
left us all in the trunk, cuz that was our vehicle cam. That was the very first test of the Nescam as a potential vehicle cam. And I didn't talk about it much at all. But even that worked really well. And the beauty of the Nest Cam is every bit of it that streamed was recorded onto the Nest Cloud system. Um,
and it did a good job. And when it was all said and done, we pulled it off. Yo know, we learned a lot of things from Irma and very quickly applied those lessons. That's one of the things I take away from my relationship with Carrie. He talked about, you know, lessons learned versus lessons applied. You got to apply what you learned. And that is
exactly what we did. And so we ended 2017 on this very positive high note. The Weather Channel was very excited about it and Jim Canour couldn't stop talking
about it. That was very helpful. It helped our Patreon grow a little bit. You know, we were really starting to do that more. Our YouTube grew a little bit more. And we were going to head into 2018 with renewed optimism and uh more ideas

and and more just innovative ways to
keep tackling the impacts of tropical
storms and hurricanes. like nobody else,
you know, and it wasn't a contest. When I say that, that doesn't mean we're going to win this thing. It is just always trying to do better, right? Like, why quit? And I love this stuff, yo know? I'm a geek uh at heart, like a weather nerd, a whole bit. Like this was just fun learning and applying and

succeeding, studying something that is the most powerful storm on earth, these hurricanes. And when we get to 2018,
things are going to change in such a way
that it is truly going to be life-changing. And we'll get to that. We'll start as every season, there's always the offseason stuff. So, a little taste of what to expect in season 6 of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. We will begin in early 2018, and we're
going to put these Nest Cams into operation immediately, and we're going to break new boundaries and break new ground uh with these GoPros as well. And

a year later, wow, things are absolutely
going to be light years ahead of where
we ended 2017. And we'll get to all of that in uh the beginning there of it anyway in the next episode of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. All right, thanks for hanging through all of this season five. I mean, 2017 alone was what
a what a big year that was. And we're done. Hurricane Nate wrapped it all up for us and it was all such a big success. Thanks for tuning in. I am Mark Sith, the host of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. I'll talk to yo again real soon as we begin season 6.

Heat. Heat. [Music]