Models forecast hurricanes, avert disaster
As a hurricane moves upon the ocean, it churns up cool water from below (shown in this computer simulation as blue). But, as was seen last year with Hurricane Katrina, warm loop currents in the Gulf can "fire up" a hurricane. Morris Bender of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory told EarthSky that combining computer models of Earth's atmosphere and ocean can give a better forecast of what a hurricane will do and how intense it will get. Photo gallery: Eyewitness photos from inside a hurricane.
DB: This is Earth & Sky. In recent years, computer models have gotten better at forecasting when and where hurricanes will impact people living on the coast.
JB: But forecasting hurricane intensity has been harder.
Morris Bender: If a storm has 75 m.p.h. winds, or a storm has 100 m.p.h. winds, it’s going to make a big difference, as far as the response.
DB: That’s Morris Bender, a research meteorologist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey. His lab provides the National Weather Service and the” National Hurricane Center”:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ with the models for forecasting hurricanes.
JB: He said sometimes the computer predictions go wrong. But as scientists refine their understanding of the physics of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans – and as they gather better information from satellites and weather balloons – the paths and intensities of live hurricanes are becoming more predictable.
Morris Bender: Our errors for two days is under 100 miles. And that’s a great, great improvement, where it may have been 140, 150 miles, 10, 15 years ago. It means great savings for evacuation costs when you realize that it’s maybe a million dollars that it costs to evacuate every mile of the coast.
JB: Those savings, Bender added, aren’t just to property, but to human lives. More at earthsky.org. Thanks today to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.
Our thanks to:
Morris Bender
Research Meteorologist
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Princeton, NJ
Additional Teacher Resources
NOAA: Hurricane Models
To forecast the track and intensity of tropical cyclones, the NHC uses several different mathematical computer models that represent the tropical cyclone and its environment in a greatly simplified manner. Each of the models has particular strengths and weaknesses, and researchers are constantly working to improve them.
NOAA: Hurricane Basics
There is nothing like them in the atmosphere. Born in warm tropical waters, these spiraling masses require a complex combination of atmospheric processes to grow, mature, and then die. They are not the largest storm systems in our atmosphere or the most violent, but they combine these qualities as no other phenomenon does.
