TOKYO — The closer you get to the eye of a hurricane or typhoon, the stronger the wind spins.

"It’s like an ice skater," said Air Force Maj. Deeann Lufkin, an aerial reconnaissance weather officer with the Air Force’s Hurricane Hunter Squadron.

As the spinning skater pulls her arms in, she goes faster and faster. As a storm’s center narrows, it whips around tighter and tighter.

"At the eye, wall it can get pretty bad," said Lufkin, a reservist who for five years has been flying through storms with the Hurricane Hunters, the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron.

"It’s pretty bumpy. It feels like you’re on a dirt road," she said.

But once you’re inside the eye, the storm’s walls fall silent for miles.

"It’s actually beautiful when you’re inside," she said.

The Hurricane Hunters are the Air Force’s only storm-tracking unit. They are mostly reservists, with a headquarters at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. Members usually get called up during storm season — usually late summer through the end of fall — to track storms along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts.

This year, part of the squadron — two WC-130Js, one crew and half of another — are in Guam as part of a multinational effort to study the origin and paths of Pacific typhoons.

During August and September, those two planes covered clear skies and chased storms to help determine the accuracy of current weather satellites. The crews also fed storm and weather data back to scientists at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

The Air Force’s storm-tracking unit began during World War II with a conversation at a bar in Texas, according to squadron members and Air Force Web sites. Two Army pilots bet each other they could fly through a storm, and on July 27, 1943, Maj. Joe Duckworth did it.

Now, the squadron typically crosses a hurricane or typhoon four times during a mission, Lufkin said, though each plane can stay up for 14 hours if needed.

During a Pacific typhoon, the planes fly at about 10,000 feet. In a storm, they fly at 5,000 feet. When the weather is clear, they fly at 30,000 feet.

"It’s safer to fly lower," Lufkin said, "so that we don’t get icing."

The crews can take weather readings — latitude, longitude, temperature, height, dew point, surface winds, winds at flight level, rainfall — twice a second. They also can drop monitors that take weather readings every eight seconds as they fall from the sky.

Their work can improve the forecast accuracy of a storm by 30 percent, Lufkin said.

Since its inception, the unit has lost only one plane, and that was because of mechanical problems. In 2005, the squadron flew repeatedly during Hurricane Katrina. Many members tracked the storm and its aftermath as it washed over their own homes and their own air base, Lufkin said.

"It was hard for those guys to be flying when they know their homes are getting hit," she said.