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Technology Front
Real-time Hurricane Forecasting
With new software and a supercomputer, improved predictions
can be made before landfall.
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Scientists
seeking to answer the question of when, where and how hard the next
hurricane will hit soon will have a new tool at their disposition.
A $5 million federal research grant to the University of Miami (UM)
earlier this year will establish a highly sophisticated set of computer
models that promises to improve the prediction of the impacts of hurricane
landfalls.
Combined with the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) track and
intensity prediction models, the “Real-Time Forecasting System
of Winds, Waves and Surge in Tropical Cyclones,” will provide
better information on the impact of hurricanes—specifically the
wind, resulting waves and storm surge—as they approach the coastline
and during landfall.
Sponsored by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP),
Hans Graber, professor of applied marine physics at UM’s Rosenstiel
School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, brought together leading
members from academia, federal agencies and the private sector to
collaborate in an innovative hurricane research project.
Understanding the interactions between the air and sea are fundamental
to hurricane studies. Small storms, for example, often are steered
by the winds in their area, but other larger storms actually can change
their environment. This new forecasting system will collectively look
at the wind, waves and storm surge and how they play off of each other.
INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY
Improvements in technology, combined with a wealth of experience,
have helped forecasters predict storm tracks and impacts with greater
accuracy. Still, most of the technology, such as wind, wave and storm
surge models, has developed independently of each other and has not
been integrated.
“This is the first time a forecasting system combines all of
the different tools that we now have to study hurricanes into one,”
says Graber. “The information we gather from this effort will
improve the ability to set up evacuation plans and minimize the loss
of lives and property damage.”
Emergency officials rely on forecasters in deciding when to order
evacuations and when to say it is safe to stay home. It currently
takes about 84 hours to evacuate the city of Miami. Yet hurricane
warnings are issued 24 hours before landfall, making the need for
predictions with a longer time frame obvious. The proposed forecasting
system should provide real-time information and predictions days in
advance to the NHC, which then will be able to issue more timely and
accurate advisories for the general public and federal agencies including
military and civil emergency response teams.
Computers are critical cogs in hurricane forecasting. Millions of
readings of wind, air pressure, humidity, light, cloud cover and other
variables are collected around the world—from flights by “hurricane
hunters” into storms, satellite images taken from space, and
land- or ocean-based observation systems—and put into computer
models.
IBM is collaborating in the project by providing equipment and computational
support and expertise to process and refine the massive amounts of
data that are generated in the forecasting effort.
The newly announced IBM eServer p690 supercomputer, code-named Regatta,
was installed at UM to handle the computations. The supercomputer
is one of IBM’s most advanced implementations of the powerful
UNIX operating system. This is the first supercomputer of its type
to operate in southern Florida and UM will be housing one of only
four others currently in the state.
In addition to providing the supercomputer, IBM will help implement
the system and ensure the NOPP partners are able to access the information
from the Internet. IBM will help optimize the projection models to
run more efficiently including enhancing the forecasting algorithms.
“The team Graber assembled has the expertise and now the computer
processing power to predict hurricane behavior with more accuracy
and more lead time than ever before,” said Christopher Colonnese,
the IBM principal investigator on the project.
Those who use the new forecasting system, such as the NHC, will ultimately
review the products of this partnership.
COLLABORATIVE EFFORT
NOPP is an innovative program that was established by the U.S. Congress
in 1996 to assure national security, advance economic development,
protect quality of life, and strengthen science education and communication
through improved knowledge of the ocean. As a collaboration of 14
federal agencies, NOPP coordinates and strengthens oceanographic efforts
by identifying and funding partnerships among academia, government,
industry and other members of the ocean sciences community. For more
information on the program visit www.nopp.org.
In addition to the University of Miami, the “Real-Time Forecasting
System of Winds, Waves and Surge in Tropical Cyclones” partnership
includes: the University of Florida, University of Central Florida,
John Hopkins University-Applied Physics Laboratory, U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National
Weather Service, Oceanweather Inc., IBM, Gigantic Computer Services,
NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, The U.S. Southern Command,
U.S. Navy-Jacksonville and Florida State Emergency Managers.
End users of the new forecasting system, such as the NHC, Kennedy
Space Center (KSC) and U.S. Navy, will greatly benefit from the improved
predictions. KSC, for example, is the starting point for all U.S.
human space flights and relies on accurate weather information to
launch the space shuttle.
The University of Florida (UF) has a long-standing area of emphasis
on modeling effects of coastal erosion from storms and waves. Several
different storm surge models are presently in use and related experience
includes modeling tides, waves, currents and fluid-sediment interactions.
The University of Central Florida (UCF) uses its state-of-the-art
computational facilities to study the impact of tides and hurricane
storm surge on estuaries and coastal regions.
Scientists of The Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory
(JHU/APL) are internationally recognized experts who actively engage
in basic research involving microwave scattering, surface-wave hydrodynamics
and air-sea interaction physics.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has conducted research activities
in the field of surface waves from field measurement programs, physical
modeling facilities and more recently ocean wave modeling. The USACE
operates a suite of numerical models to generate climatologies of
winds, waves and water levels for all U.S. coastal waters.
NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of the Atlantic Oceanographic
and Meteorological Laboratory is the nation’s center and the
acknowledged international leader in basic and applied research on
hurricanes and tropical meteorology. In conjunction with HRD’s
annual Hurricane Field Program, the HRD’s real-time Hurricane
Wind Analysis System has become the standard for documenting hurricane
landfall wind events in the Atlantic/Caribbean basin. |
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