In 1998, Jose Martinez-Claros was a school child as Hurricane Mitch crossed Honduras – twice, killing thousands – but that brush with disaster drove him to eventually become an atmospheric physicist who has even flown through storms for work.
Martinez-Claros, who is now a doctoral candidate in the Physics Department of the Institute of Mines and Technology in New Mexico, said Hurricane Mitch, his mother picked him up from school and ran houses over bridges perched in flooded rivers.
“I congratulate my mother’s metal nerves for being able to take us home, with part of the road that already had a river of descent,” he said.
Arriving home, they turned on the television, only to see a TV reporter swept away by riverwaters during the broadcast.
“Everyone in shock: we had all noticed that someone died live on television, doing their job,” he said.
Martinez-Claros said his brain filled with questions after the hurricane, which only killed another 3,000 people in Tegucigalpa, and more than ten thousand people in Honduras, leaving another five hundred thousand people homeless.
“It’s Eureka’s time: how did it happen? Why can only a hurricane cross my country twice and print permanent damage everywhere? What is a hurricane? How do they form?” He said: “In a month, I had investigated the hurricanes so much that I knew what I was looking to do for the rest of my life, being an atmospheric scientist.
But his path to his professional vocation was almost as complicated and tortuous as this adventure back to the storm.
“The weather wasn’t specialized at any university in Honduras, so I had to stay and do anything else, or leave the country to go into meteorology,” he said.
He ended up at the Universidad de Costa Rica for his undergraduate studies in meteorology, only to find that a significant part of the curriculum was shared with the physics students.
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because when Martinez-Claros, despite everything, he presented a funded position for higher education, it was in atmospheric physics, not in atmospheric sciences.
In mid-2017, Martinez-Claros was able to satisfy a lifelong dream when he joined the box crusade of NASA’s Convection Experiment (CPEX), a month-long aerial crusade in the Gulf, Caribbean and Western Atlantic region.
“Not only can I fly internally in a storm, but I’m also in the company of one of my years-of-training heroes, NOAA hurricane hunter Rob Rogers,” he said, “2017 the year of names of tragically historic hurricanes, like Irma, Maria, Harvey and we flew through all those spaces one or two months before those mega-hurricanes formed.”
Martínez-Claros says that most of his existing studies are made up of knowledge collected by CPEX, i.e. knowledge of fall probes, knowledge collection devices introduced from aircraft search flights.
“Many scientists have studied tropical convection in the past, and many other scientists have studied atmospheric rivers in the past,” he said, “However, as far as I know, there is no existing one that focuses on the link between the two, especially within the conceptual framework of saturation fraction, the instability index, and the whirlwind.”
Martinez-Claros says that while evolved countries have invested abundant resources to examine and characterize tropical systems, and apply this wisdom to mitigate herbal errors around the world, only scientists in the global South can speak well with their populations in a way that affects their attitudes toward the climate.
“My biggest motivation over the past twenty years has been to perceive the climate in the tropics, especially in moderately the damage that excessive weather conditions can cause in countries that do not have the resources to examine these occasions well,” he said. “One of the most demanding situations of my life, after spending 14 years running to achieve my goal, is to ask myself what will stand and how I can hold my other people with my knowledge,” he said.
Another Central American scientist is also motivated through his reports of years of training in the region. Salvadoran virologist David Martinez grew up with public fitness campaigns aimed at reducing the spread of mosquitoes to prevent dengue and has now dedicated his career to seeking a better vaccine against the virus.
He now has the same skills as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, and has an assignment to help locate tactics to prevent the new coronavirus from infecting people.
I am an Australian science journalist based in Medellin, Colombia since 2014. The Global South is confronting the world’s biggest science challenges: sustainable