When tropical systems threaten the United States or the Caribbean, NOAA's hurricane hunters are set to spring into action.

The hurricane hunters are pilots, meteorologists and scientists who fly into the heart of tropical storms and hurricanes. The information they provide greatly affects hurricane forecasting, which helps meteorologists prepare the public for a storm.

A staff of more than 100 people at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa gets the call whenever a storm needs investigating. When that happens, they fly planes directly into the storms.

One of the planes - a P-3 nicknamed "Miss Piggy" - flies at the lowest altitude in hurricanes and can penetrate the most dangerous part of the storm: the eyewall.

Then there's the Gulfstream G-4, affectionately known as "Gonzo." That plane flies at much higher altitudes, collecting measurements like wind data and air pressure to sample the environment surrounding the storm.

According to flight director and meteorologist Mike Holmes, about 10 people will be on board Gonzo when it flies into a storm, including the pilots, flight meteorologists, flight directors, project scientists, a systems administrator and the staff member who drops the data collection devices into the storm.

The staff member who drops the data collection devices - known as wind sondes - sits near the back, near a chute that empties out beneath the plane.

"When the flight director gets to a point where we need to send one of our wind sondes out of the aircraft, he will call it over the intercom system. and the drop wind sonde operator will load up one of the chutes, make sure the data is being connected," Holmes said. "He'll load it in the shoot drop it immediately on the request of the flight director.

Between 25 and 40 of the devices are dropped per mission. They are used to sample the atmosphere of the hurricane. The information is then used to track the storm's development. The information is then used in computer models, spaghetti model plots and the forecast cone.

The hurricane hunters will get some new technology in 2015. Capt. Harris Halverson, who has been with NOAA for the last five years, said the P-3 is set to get some new instrumentation for its tail Doppler radar.

"A lot of the researchers think it's one of the holy grails of hurricane research is to get that tail Doppler research into the intensity forecast," he said.

And in the future, NOAA could see more unmanned missions in the form of drones to collect data.

we're partnering with NASA to look at a global hawk they've been flying over storms lately to determine different measurements for the storms," Halverson said.

Halverson said drones can be used in the middle of the ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, hopefully allowing forecasters to better predict where the storms are going and how big they could get.

For the hurricane hunters, it all comes down to one important thing: safety first.

"The safety of flight is far and away the number one priority," Holmes said. "So we don't go someplace where it's not safe."

Holmes said the staff takes a lot of pride in their work, and they love doing it.

"We have the very best engineers, the very best computer technicians, the very best meteorologists, including myself, the very best pilots," he said. "Just an extraordinary group of people, makes it just a wonderful place to work "