This week's question comes from Morning Brief reader Sean, who asks, "Why do people chase hurricanes?" It's a reasonable thing to wonder about, particularly considering the dangerous conditions that hurricanes can cause.

Meteorologist Intern Hayden Marshall: Most of the public would agree that they should stay away from hurricanes when possible. That certainly would be the advice that we, as meteorologists, would give.

But there are meteorological reasons for chasing hurricanes, either as a hurricane hunter in the air or on the ground. The first would be media, photography, coverage and trying to communicate to the public, “These are the impacts that we're experiencing from this particular storm.”

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We put ourselves in the path of storms so that you don't have to be there to see it. Storm chasers love taking pictures. Those can be invaluable for damage reports.

Seeing is believing, right? I can tell someone all day that there will be a 15-20 foot storm surge in this area. But what does that mean on the ground? What's going to happen in my neighborhood, in my backyard, if that occurs?

By having someone there or having a way of covering that, storm chasing visually helps people understand what weather means for them personally.

The second reason would be information, and data can be plugged into models. This is why we have hurricane hunters that chase storms by plane. They have what's called “dropsondes,” which are tubes that drop from the plane.

The tubes record temperature, dew point, pressure, wind and other information that can be plugged back into a model to forecast what the storm will do further down the road.

Hurricane hunters may also have Doppler radar on board. On land, we have Doppler radars that we can use to view the weather. But in the ocean, where hurricanes are, you need to transport a Doppler radar to the location. We don't have a radar just sitting on a buoy to do it.

This means we can send a microwave down from the plane. That will reflect off the hydrometeors, or the raindrops, and will allow you to answer questions. What's the velocity of that raindrop? What does the wind profile of the storm look like? What's the structure of the storm?

We do have satellites that can look down at these storms from space, but the amount of information they give us is limited. We can see the tops of the clouds, their shape and temperature, but it can’t tell us what’s going on underneath the hood. That’s what storm chasers can do best.

Do you have a question to ask the meteorologists at Weather.com? Write to us at [email protected] and we’ll pick a new question each week from readers to answer.