A Fitting End: Hurricane Hunter's Ashes Spread Inside Hurricane Milton

A NOAA crew gathers to remember their colleague Peter
Dodge shortly after the hurricane hunter flight dropped
the ashes of Dodge into the eyewall of 
Hurricane Milton last Tuesday. 

 Forecasts in the days ahead of Hurricane Milton's landfall near Siesta Key, Florida last Wednesday evening were remarkably accurate. 

Landfall was only a dozen or so miles off from what the National Hurricane Center anticipated days earlier. They pretty much correctly predicted Hurricane Milton's rise to become a Category 5 monster. 

And they got the fact that although the winds diminished somewhat in the hours leading to landfall, the storm expanded, ensuring widespread destruction in Florida.

These great forecasts undoubtedly saved lives, as so many people fled vulnerable coastal communities.

A lot of the credit for these great forecasts are the hurricane hunters. They regularly fly missions into the heart of hurricanes, dropping meteorological instruments into the maelstroms to update clues as to what the dangerous storm might do next. 

So, we saw a fitting honor for Peter Dodge, a meteorologist hurricane hunter who through his four-decade career flew into 386 storms. He died last year at the age of 73, and a NOAA hurricane hunter flight dropped Dodge's ashes in the eyewall of Hurricane Milton last Tuesday. 

"An in-flight observations log, which charts information such as position and wind speed, ended with a reference to Dodge's 387th - and final -flight," reports CBS News. 

The ashes were released when Hurricane Milton was pretty much at its peak. The same observations log recorded Milton's to wind speed at 179 mph around the time the ashes were dropped. 

As the Washington Post tells us:

"The ashes were wrapped in the state flag of Florida, Dodge's home state, along with his flight suit's name tag and a patch denoting his hundreds of eyewall flights.

Frank Marks, Dodge's close friend and colleague, said releasing the ashes into Hurricane Milton was 'a total honor and a great tribute and all he's done for us.'"

In addition to his flights, Dodge back in the 1980s developed radar technology that was used to study storms. Programs Dodge wrote over the years are the origins of technology that is still used to track storms.  

In the last decade of his life, he could no longer fly missing into hurricanes due to failing eyesight. But he used a Braille keyboard to refine programs future crews would use in hurricane hunts.