VERO BEACH — As hundreds of Indian River County locals fled the barrier island in Vero Beach Monday under mandatory evacuation orders, a group of severe-storm researchers rushed in the opposite direction with excitement.

For scientists, a hurricane is not an opportunity to worry, but rather to learn.

While Hurricane Dorian was gradually crawling up Florida's coastline, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers collected meteorological data from the howling winds that potentially could help to save millions of lives people in the future.

NOAA research meteorologist Sean Waugh flew with his team from Norman, Oklahoma, Florida's east coast with one mission in mind: learn more about our world's environment using Hurricane Dorian as a case study.

"We're trying to observe the changes of these tropical systems as they actually approach and eventually make landfall in some cases," Waugh told TCPalm in an exclusive interview. "We're trying to understand how that environment changes and how it interacts with the land mass around it."

More:Mandatory evacuations ordered Monday morning for Indian River County Residents east of U.S. Highway 1

At Jaycee Beach Park in Vero Beach, one of the closest public-access points to the ocean that was not yet barricaded by law enforcement, Waugh and his team of researchers prepared a weather balloon to launch 82,000 feet into the atmosphere.

His vehicle, a "mobile surface observing station," essentially is a rolling laboratory. Equipment is bolted into and above the vehicle that is used to run experiments on temperature, pressure, wind-speed and humidity, Waugh said.

Attached to the weather balloon was a radiosonde, a battery-powered instrument that measures atmospheric shifts and transmits them back to earth through a radio signal. Waugh's team launches radiosondes into Hurricane Dorian every six hours, he said.

The data fed back helps determine current location of the clouds and other elements of the hurricane, and so far its forecasts have been spot-on, according to Waugh.

"That profile of the atmosphere is what we need to be able to understand what the entire environment looks like," Waugh said. "And then we can see changes as that system approaches."

These observations normally are taken twice a day, everyday from the National Weather Service all across the nation, Waugh said. It is the basic foundation of weather forecasting.

Within seconds of the balloon's launch, live data began pouring into Waugh's laptop. This particular balloon traveled through Dorian's feeder bands and measured temperature, winds and relative humidity, variables used to help predict the storm's precise location.

More:Vero Beach resident stays with family to ride out Hurricane Dorian together

"There's this large hole with hurricane research," Waugh said. "And we're here to understand the moment these effects start reaching land."

Max Chesnes is a TCPalm breaking news reporter for Indian River County. You can keep up with Max on Twitter @MaxChesnes and give him a call at 772-978-2224.