Jim Warnecke makes landfall at Willis Elementary

LAKEWOOD RANCH — When he was just 8 years old, Jim Warnecke knew he wanted to grow up and fly in airplanes.

He still has the paper he wrote to prove it.

And decades later, not only has the Lakewood Ranch Golf & Country Club resident logged more than 5,000 hours onboard aircraft, but also he has flown right into the eye of nearly 60 hurricanes and tropical storms as a hurricane hunter with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s exciting to be able to actually make a difference in people’s lives,” Warnecke said, adding the missions not only provide important research data, but also impact hurricane evacuations and more. “What we do has a definite impact on a lot of people.

“I’ve got the coolest job in the world,” he said. “There’s not that many people who do it.”

Warnecke visited first-grade students at Willis Elementary School Jan. 12, sharing his experience as one of about 65 civilians worldwide to do hurricane research for a living.

“It’s kind of like riding a roller coaster for six hours,” Warnecke told students of flying in a storm.
During his presentation, Warnecke let students handle measuring tools and other equipment used by NOAA researchers and also encouraged them to pay attention to their teachers, read zealously, stay out of trouble and work hard so they can chase hurricanes — or pursue other interests — when they grow up.

“I liked (the presentation),” said first-grader Ryan Garrison, adding he wants to discover an underwater sea creature and see “all the pretty fish” when he grows up. “I learned the eye of the hurricane wall is dangerous.

“It made me want to do (study oceans) even more,” he said. “I learned not to eat so much fish, because whales can’t eat anything if there’s no fish.”

TAKING FLIGHT
Warnecke served in the U.S. Army in the 1980s, before joining the U.S. Navy five years later. There, he started flying in Lockheed P-3 type aircraft, similar to the ones flown by NOAA. He later worked as a contractor, doing similar work for U.S. Customs, and then worked as a trader for Fidelity Investments from 2006 to 2008. When the economy crumbled, Warnecke began looking for alternative work, and soon began a 16-month process to be hired at NOAA in 2010.

In the past two years at NOAA, he has accumulated several-hundred flight hours to include 33 hurricane eyewall penetrations into five different storms.

Warnecke admitted his first flight into the eye of a storm proved nerve-wracking, but the experience now has become more business-as-usual than stressful.

“It’s not dangerous; it’s a calculated risk,” said Warnecke, who drops an instrument used to collect wind speed and other measurements out of the plane during hurricane-hunting missions. “The pilots are very experienced. You put your confidence in (the professionals with you).”

Warnecke’s stormy adventures, perhaps, are the most attention-grabbing part of his job, but he and his team at NOAA spend most of their time preparing aircraft, and the technology on them, for research flights, whether for hurricane-hunting missions, for equipping planes to measure snowfall so researchers can predict how severely a river will flood, or for hooking up cameras systems to estimate populations of fish or sea mammals.

“Hurricane hunting is only about 40% of what we do,” Warnecke said. “My group (in the Science and Engineering Branch of NOAA) tests the equipment, operates the equipment and fixes the equipment — all the sensors, radar sensors, the navigation system. We use these tools to look at where (the storm) is, where it’s going and why it’s going there. We estimate its intensity at landfall.”

Preparing for each research flight, regardless of its purpose, is time consuming. Uninstalling an aircraft’s software and other systems takes three to six weeks, and preparing them for the next project takes just as long, Warnecke said.

Making sure the systems function correctly, Warnecke said, is extra important because planes can’t “just turn around” inside a storm if a system fails.

Warnecke said he enjoys speaking to children about his job, because each student takes away a different piece of information. Plus, he hopes they understand that hurricane chasing, or another career, is something they can aspire to one day, he said.

Warnecke said he has visited 17 schools in the last few years to speak. His daughter, Brie Middlebrook, is a first-grader at Willis.

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].

By the numbers
10 — Number of approximate hours hurricane hunters spend in flight while researching a storm
100 — Number of people — military and civilian — who do hurricane research and resonance at NOAA
4,500 — Estimate in dollars for how much it costs to run a P-3 Aircraft for one hour
5,000 — Number of feet in the air at which hurricane hunters fly into a storm
1 million — Estimated cost for preparing one mile of shoreline for a storm surge associated with a hurricane or tropical storm

‘CANE COSTS
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Electronic Technician Jim Warnecke said it costs about $48,000 to run an eight-hour hurricane eye-wall penetration flight. Last year, NOAA spent an estimated $500,000 on such flights compared to the roughly $900 million it saved communities in costs for preparing shoreline for storm surges.

Warnecke said NOAA’s research helps pinpoint where a hurricane or storm will make landfall, which, unnecessary preparation.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Jim Warnecke

1. Warnecke has a lot of favorite movies, but one at the top of his list is “Forrest Gump.” “There’s deeper meaning to it on an intellectual side,” he says.

2. Warnecke said his favorite type of food is probably Chinese or Asian cuisine — a taste he acquired early in his military career while serving in countries such as Guam and the Philippines.

3. Warnecke thoroughly enjoys reading, and when it comes to choosing books, he opts for educational reads. “I’m a big history nut,” he says.

4. Warnecke says one of the most interesting things he’s ever done was to swim with whale sharks in Australia. “That was an amazing thing,” he says. “They’re coming up next to you and letting you pet them and they’re completely wild animals. They’re huge. It’s unnerving.”

5. Having spent much of his career in the military, Warnecke has been to 86 countries and on six of the seven continents.