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Digital Eye on Ivan
The Poynter Institute's Al Tompkins yesterday collected a number of helpful links on the storm coverage for his column. One interesting site Tompkins picked out is the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel's Hurricane Maker, an interactive Flash tool that lets users see first hand how hurricanes form. His column today also had a great overview description of a storm surge as a primer for reporters. He linked to a USA Today story on storm surges. Tompkins also has a link to monitoring stations for tides throughout the area affected by Ivan.
Storm Data Just a Click Away
The National Hurricane Center is the best online destination for updates on Ivan, as well as the newest hurricane on the horizon -- Jeanne. The satellite images are a must-see.
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For the complete weather junkie, the National Buoy Data Center has plenty of information on Ivan. The Birmingham News features a story on Buoy 42040, a weather buoy located 75 miles south of the Alabama Gulf coast. Excerpt: "Sites such as Buoy 42040's become celebrities in severe weather as armchair meteorologists search unfiltered data from coastal monitoring stations, river flood gauges and live Web cams. 'With technology these days, detailed information is at everyone's fingertips,' said Krissy Hurley, a National Weather Service staffer in Birmingham whose temporary rotation to the Texas regional office as duty meteorologist just happened to coincide with Ivan. 'A lot of this stuff is fascinating, and fairly understandable to the average person.'"
• The Birmingham News: Storm Watchers Dial Buoy 42040 For Info
Hurricane Hunters
Reporters weren't the only ones crazy enough to venture into Ivan's path. The Huntsville Times has a story on storm chasers from the University of Alabama-Huntsville's atmospheric science department who journeyed to the Florida panhandle for first-hand observations. "While 200-mile wide Hurricane Ivan spiraled its first ominous clouds over the Gulf Coast Wednesday morning, Justin Walters was fixated on finding a silver-dollar size washer so he could meet the monster and take its temperature. Hobbled by a broken bearing on the wheel of a flatbed trailer carrying a Doppler radar system, Walters and three other researchers from the University of Alabama in Huntsville balanced fear of driving their sensitive equipment into the storm with equal fear of missing it. The team left Huntsville Tuesday morning with three vehicles packed with more than $500,000 worth of computers, weather equipment and plenty of energy bars to snack on," the article said.
• The Huntsville Times: UAH Storm Chasers Brave Coast To Face Monster Ivan
In a telling sign of Ivan's power, even the U.S. Air Force's airborne hurricane watchers were forced to abandon their home base. "On Tuesday, the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, better known as the military's Hurricane Hunters, evacuated Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi and resumed their daredevil flights into Ivan from Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida," the Associated Press reported yesterday afternoon. "The squadron's 10 WC-130 airplanes -- 96-foot behemoths weighing 155,000 pounds on takeoff -- are flying round the clock into Ivan to give forecasters at the National Hurricane Center the latest on the intensity and path of the hurricane."
• The Associated Press via The Pensacola News Journal: Ivan Chases Hurricane Hunters From Base
The Science of Forecasting
The Associated Press reported today on the role that supercomputers are playing in hurricane forecasting, with a report from a research center in Monterrey, Calif. "Working through complex mathematical equations that describe the atmosphere's behavior across the globe, hundreds of microprocessors perform billions of calculations each second on observations collected by sensors dropped by aircraft and other monitors. The result, after more than an hour of number crunching at the U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical weather computing center, is just one of the many predictions generated by supercomputers around the world that help frame such life-or-death decisions as whether to order evacuations and where to safely set up shelters," the AP said. "The programs that model the atmosphere and the high-performance computers that do this work have revolutionized weather forecasting, improving our ability to predict the paths of hurricanes and fluctuations in their intensity."
• The Associated Press via The Washington Post: Supercomputers Aid Hurricane Forecasting (Registration required)
The Times-Picayune also reported yesterday about advances in meteorology that have helped get a handle on a hurricane's likely track. "Measurements of all sorts -- air pressure, temperatures of shallow and deep ocean currents, temperatures of air and cloud tops, rainfall, wind speeds, even dust from the Sahara Desert -- are being collected by land stations, ocean buoys, weather balloons and a number of sophisticated satellites. They are combined with information from packages of instruments dropped into and around hurricanes by Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hurricane research planes. Each set of data can be plugged into a growing variety of computer models to help forecasters determine when and where a storm will go and what its intensity will be when it gets there."
• New Orleans Times-Picayune: Meteorology Makes Strides In Predicting Foul Weather
The New York Times reported this week on how the National Weather Service keeps tabs on big storms. "Never has the need for improved forecasts been greater. Not only are more people in harm's way, on coasts from Asia to Florida, but most experts now agree that after two decades of relative quiescence the Atlantic will have increased hurricane activity for up to several decades. The reason is that the Atlantic Ocean shifted, as of 1995, to a pattern of water temperatures and air circulation that energizes storms. Experts also foresee a slow rise in hurricane intensity and rainfall from global warming," the paper wrote. "While forecasting individual storms remains a vexing challenge, the projections of hurricane paths have improved enough that last year the hurricane center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lengthened its forecasts from three days to five. The change came after two years of testing showed that the five-day forecasts were as accurate as three-day forecasts had been 15 years earlier."
• The New York Times: Where Is the Hurricane Going? (Registration required)
Recipe For Disaster
The Washington Post featured an interesting story earlier this week on how hurricanes form. But defining how hurricanes are created is an imperfect science. "Hurricanes are assembled from the usual building blocks of weather -- air, water, heat, wind, differences in pressure and temperature, and the contours of Earth. In the case of these destructive storms, however, the pieces come together in a way that, while not exactly rare, is always somewhat unlikely. The result is a phenomenon that is self-feeding and self-reinforcing. A hurricane's size and power allow it to grow even larger and more powerful. For a while at least, hurricanes defy the universe's natural tendency toward disorder -- its pieces becoming more ordered and less random, its energy concentrated rather than dissipated," the paper said.
• The Washington Post: Recipe For A Hurricane Relies On Happenstance (Registration required)
BBC News had its own dispatch on the chemistry of hurricanes. An excerpt: "A hurricane is a large rotating storm centered on an area of very low pressure, with wind speeds in excess of 119km/h (74mph). For a hurricane to form several conditions must be fulfilled: Sea surface temperatures greater than 26C; Rapidly cooling air above; A sufficient spin from the rotating Earth. As the warm sea heats the air above it, a current of warm moist air rises up quickly, creating a centre of low pressure at the surface. Trade winds rush in towards the low pressure area and inward spiralling winds whirl upwards releasing heat and moisture. The rotation of the Earth causes the column to twist around the eye which remains calm and free from clouds."
• BBC News: The Science of Hurricanes