ASU graduate student Brad Busby releases a weather balloon at Windy Point in the Catalinas, part of an effort by to determine what makes our monsoon tick.

Chris Coduto / Arizona Daily Star

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Tornados get the glamour. Scientists "chase" them. Hollywood made a movie about it.

Nobody has to chase our monsoon, but it is legend among weather scientists.

The location of the thermal engine that powers the wild summer thunderstorms is well-known.

As early as 8 a.m., long before those cauliflower clouds form and soar over the Catalinas, there are invisible things happening that will, or will not, lead to a storm later in the day, says Arizona State University weather researcher Joe Zehnder.

The problem, Zehnder says, is that weather pros still don't know enough about what makes the monsoon tick to accurately predict if, and exactly when, it will boom.

For that information, Zehnder and a team of weather scientists from several universities and government agencies are going inside the monsoon's engine. Monsoon 2006 will get probed, measured and tested like a No. 1 draft pick.

Nearly a dozen weather scientists arrived in town early last week to work on the Cumulus Photogrammetric, In-Situ and Doppler Observations 2006 project — CuPIDO 2006. They want to know everything.

Then, says Zehnder, they hope to use that information to predict monsoon storms earlier and more accurately, maybe even forecasting precisely where and how much rain will fall.

But to get the detailed information Zehnder says they need, they'll have to physically get inside the weather system.

This is science as a team sport.

The team members all have positions, jobs they'll do every day with storm potential through the end of the month.

Starting with the project's Tuesday kickoff, one group slowly cruises the air over and around the Catalinas in a plane loaded with radar, video and atmospheric instruments.

Two other units — one at Windy Point and another at Redington Pass — launch up to 20 weather balloons each day, probing the mountain air above for wind, humidity, temperature and other readings.

Others compile data from 10 sophisticated weather stations on and around the mountains.

They'll also get images from five digital cameras trained on the Catalinas to generate 3-D images of clouds.

In some cases, the data-gathering gives new meaning to "physical science."

The National Science Foundation's Beech King Air, a twin turboprop outfitted for weather research, growls back and forth across the mountains, sniffing the monsoon system up to four hours at a time. The old plane's air conditioning is no match for the solar blast just outside its thin aluminum skin.

The fourth crewman, in the hot and cramped rear of the plane, has it the toughest as the moist air heats and churns above the mountains.

The project's first daily 2 p.m. debriefing and planning session Tuesday in a UA classroom has a casual, upbeat feel.

Some of the team members are kidding that day's fourth-seat occupant, meteorologist Cory Demko.

"Let's just say there weren't any barf bags back there," says Demko, a doctoral candidate from the University of Wyoming.

"There was a lot more action today," UA researcher Mike Leuthold says in a weather briefing. "More vertical development. The reason we haven't had thunderstorms the last few days," says Leuthold, "we had drying, easterly flow."

At this point, it's as if he realizes he's talking to a room full of people who "get it," and the briefing turns into a brain-clogging storm of alphabet soup and acronyms.

But the good news from Leuthold, in clear English, is, "The Weather Service is calling for a very big day tomorrow (Wednesday)."

Any question about whether these experts' interest in weather is strictly academic is cleared up when there's a deep boom from outside. A number of them rush to the window. The big weather they're here to study has arrived.

After talking it over with the King Air crew's Bart Geerts, a UW faculty member and the project's other principal investigator, Zehnder and company settle on an 8:30 a.m. takeoff time for Wednesday's flight.

Wednesday morning, at Windy Point on the Mount Lemmon Highway, Timothy Lim's crew is filling a latex weather balloon with helium. Every half hour they blow one up until it's nearly 4 feet in diameter, attach a little white plastic device called a radiosonde, and let it go. The balloon takes off fast, rising at 4 to 6 meters per second, or up to 20 feet a second, says Lim, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

The radiosonde gathers and transmits temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction and altitude data.

Engine humming

Back at the 2 p.m. debriefing, the team is looking at the time-lapse QuickTime movie loop Zehnder made from the day's digital camera images. The bright white clouds well up and collapse in the blue sky over the Catalinas, again and again, the solar energy- and moisture-powered engine turning over.

Crew members talk about it "trying," as if the weather had a will and wanted to cook up a storm. Clearly, they're rooting for one.

Meteorologist Erik Pytlak of the National Weather Service Tucson office doesn't pull any punches. He's happy to be here. He's the go-to guy on the local monsoon storms and his opinion is sought and respected, even among this bunch of meteorology pros.

He likes his daily forecasting job, but today, he says, he's in his "science guy" role.

And most weather pros, he says, really and truly like weather. It's not just a bunch of numbers to them.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast is bad. A dry mass to the east and south is coming this way and will not provide enough moisture to fuel the storms.

"OK," says Zehnder, "we're going with a down day tomorrow."

The plane and balloon crews won't be flying.

But, says Pytlak, there may be a treat in store for the researchers. There is, he says, a tropical disturbance south of Acapulco.

Still, the consensus is that the monsoon is off for now, and they scratch flying again for Friday.

For Zehnder, the work won't end when the team breaks camp at the end of the month. He and some of the others will use the data they've collected. He's been working on CuPIDO for two years, and now it's almost time for the analysis and writing.

He's got another grant application in to fund a continuation of the work.

But, after two years with his head in the clouds, Zehnder says, "Frankly, next summer I want to go fishing in Alaska."