Luke Ziemba, an aerosols scientist at NASA Langley, recently returned from a flight aboard a P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to fly through Hurricane Cristobal to study how aerosols can affect storms.

At 2 a.m. on Aug. 23, Luke Ziemba strapped himself into a P-3 turboprop aircraft with 14 other scientists and flight crew in Tampa, Fla., and set off to rendezvous with a hurricane.

Technically, Cristobal wasn't a hurricane yet, but a tropical depression far off in the Atlantic. By the second night, it had accelerated to a tropical storm. And by the third night, Cristobal was a full-blown, if disorganized, Category 1 hurricane.

And each night the P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft in its eight-hour flight sliced right through the storm's howling outer wall and buffeting winds, arrowing to its relatively calm eye. There, Ziemba an aerosols scientist at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton collected and measured dust particles to better understand their role in storm formation and intensity.

"Aerosols can be ingested into the storm from different locations, and they can affect how storms intensify and deintensify, and weaken the storm," Ziemba explained Thursday.

And a better grasp of this process can one day help computer modelers better predict a storm's route or strength, he said.

Ziemba's third and final flight was Monday.

Early the next morning, a big Global Hawk unmanned aircraft took off from NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, heading east.

It was packed with 83 dropsonde sensors to release as it went as the remotely piloted plane flew a "lawnmower" pattern back and forth atop Hurricane Cristobal. The devices would measure wind, temperature, pressure and humidity as they coursed through the belly of the beast.

Finally, after 22 hours in the air, the Global Hawk landed Wednesday morning at NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore, ready to begin its third and final summer sojourn on Wallops Island to study how hurricanes are born, develop and die.

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NASA Langley, NOAA study the birth of hurricanes | With Video