As the Popo Agie River wends its way down from the glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains toward the city of Lander, it flows into a limestone cave and disappears. The formation, known as the Sinks, spits the river back out at another feature called the Rise a quarter of a mile east, a little more voluminous and a little warmer, with brown and rainbow trout weighing as much as 10 pounds mingling in its now smooth pools. The quarter-mile journey from the Sinks to the Rise takes the river two hours.

Scientists first discovered this quirk of the middle fork of the Popo Agie (pronounced puh-po zuh) in 1983 by pouring red dye into the river upstream and waiting for it to resurface. Geologists attribute the river’s mysterious delay to the water passing through exceedingly small crevasses in the rock that slow its flow.

Like many rivers in the arid West, the Popo Agie is an important aquifer. Ranchers, farmers, businesses, and recreationists rely on detailed data about it—especially day-to-day streamflow measurements. That’s exactly the type of empirical information collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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On Tuesday evening during a measurement flight, the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center dropped the ashes of Peter Dodge, a longtime radar scientist and hurricane hunter, in the eye of Hurricane Milton. The drop honored Dodge's 44-year career and his contributions to radar meteorology and tropical cyclone research.

As the powerful and dangerous storm bears down on Florida, the release of Dodge's ashes was an unusually peaceful moment during a type of flight that is typically quite turbulent. Michael Lowry, a Hurricane Specialist and Storm Surge Expert at WPLG-TV in Florida, celebrated the moment on X, calling it a "beautiful tribute."

Lowry's post included a screenshot of a Vortex Data Message, which is a log of in-flight observations made by hurricane reconnaissance aircraft, detailing the storm's center location, pressure, wind speed, temperature, and other key meteorological data used to assess the intensity and structure of the cyclone. At the end, a tribute line reads, "PETER DODGE HX SCI (1950–2023) 387TH PENNY."

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