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| An EYE
To the SKY
Max
Mayfield
understands the science of
hurricanes and the need to
keep people informed and safe.
By Howard Shingle
|
This
is the guy. As director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in
Miami, FL, Max Mayfield is the guy CNN, ABC and other national networks
and local media cut away to whenever a tropical storm heads our way.
Overseeing a team of hurricane forecasters, specialists and technical
personnel, one of Mayfield’s core responsibilities is to direct
NHC’s efforts to inform the public on the development, direction
and intensity of hurricanes.
It’s a job Mayfield has taken to heart, and technology has rapidly
advanced. For hurricane seasons, NHC uses a pool of local media teams
to broadcast watches and warnings as necessary. Mayfield explains
that together the media and NHC have established four-minute time
slots during which Hurricane Center forecasters can convey storm information
to a different local market every four minutes. NHC’s understanding
with the national networks is that any of their reserved time slots
may be bumped for a local warning.
Getting this air time would be the envy of any young broadcaster,
but given Mayfield’s connection with the destructive force of
a hurricane, the less on-air time for him, the better for everyone.
“We only had one hurricane make landfall here in the last few
years,” Mayfield notes. “We had Irene back in ’99
and we didn’t have another hurricane hit the United States until
this past year with Hurricane Lili. So we haven’t been on as
much as we used to be on, but nobody here is complaining about that.”
CLEAR MISSION
Actually, it was Mayfield’s predecessor who opened the Hurricane
Center to the media in the 1980s and began this partnership with news
outlets, so when Mayfield took over as director in May 2000, it was
an expected and recognized part of the job.
“Our mission
is real clear: to save lives, mitigate property loss and improve economic
efficiency by issuing the best watches, warnings, forecasts and analysis
of hazardous tropical weather. The main thing we try to do, of course,
is save lives,” Mayfield says.
That mission includes two important functions: to understand the science
of hurricanes—how they develop, how they intensify and where
they are headed—and to communicate that information to the public.
“It’s not just about making forecasts,” Mayfield
says. “We use satellites—that’s really the primary
observing tool that we have—and we have aircraft recognizance.
But it really doesn’t matter if you have the best satellites
and the best aircraft and the best coastal radars and very accurate
computer models and fast computers . . . even if you make a perfect
forecast that’s not the end of it. We still have to communicate
that forecast along with any uncertainty in that forecast to users.
We really want to be sure that we’re getting through to the
emergency managers and the other local officials who are really in
the trenches calling for the evacuations.”
The job requires a team effort, and the NHC staff takes it seriously.
“About half of the staff at the Hurricane Center lived in the
southern half of Miami-Dade County (FL) when Hurricane Andrew hit
in 1992,” Mayfield says, “so people on the staff here
can really speak with personal background and experience.”
TRUE METEOROLOGIST
Mayfield has been NHC director for two-and-a-half years or “three
hurricane seasons,” as he puts it. But he has been with the
Hurricane Center for 31 years and his interest in weather goes back
even further.
“I grew up in Oklahoma and just seeing the
severe thunderstorms and tornadoes and the damage caused by those
systems really got me interested in meteorology when I was a child,”
he says.
His undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Oklahoma
gave him the background he needed to be serious about meteorology,
but two life experiences steered his interest specifically to tropical
meteorology and hurricanes.
“When I was in high school my
parents used to take me fishing down to Padre Island on the Texas
coast, and one year they had a really bad hurricane that wiped out
the fishing pier we used to go to. Later, when I got into the Air
Force and started forecasting, in 1971 we had Hurricane Ginger out
in the Atlantic that was out there for something like 31 days. We
briefed the helicopter pilots in those days on the hurricane and I
really got interested in hurricanes.”
A true meteorologist, Mayfield admits there also is a certain attraction
to the awesome force of these storms. “It’s hard to believe.
Even when you see them in satellite imagery, they are just spectacular.
Of course, I like to see them out in the middle of the ocean. I don’t
like to see them anywhere near land.”
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NUMBERS
It’s when they do come close to land that the NHC’s work
becomes most visible. Last year, for example, was considered active
in terms of the number of named tropical cyclones. In fact, Mayfield
explains that in the Atlantic basin there were 12 named storms, which
is above the average of 10 per season. Only four of those became hurricanes
and that is a little bit below the long-term average of six. Of those,
two became major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher on the Saffir Simpson
hurricane scale).
September was unusually busy. “We had eight named systems that
formed in that month, and that made it the busiest calendar month
on record in the Atlantic,” Mayfield says. “Also a lot
of the storms last year were near land so that meant that we had watches
and warnings up and things get a lot more hectic anytime they are
near land.”
But, Mayfield says, numbers alone don’t tell the story—actually,
they may be misleading. “Overall, if you look at a parameter
that we’ve been using called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy
Index—if you take the wind speed and square that wind every
six hours for the life of the storm or hurricane and use that parameter,
you’d find that [last season] was somewhat below normal. That
parameter really counts the duration and the intensity of the storms
or hurricanes so we like that better than a simple number.”
Forecasting hurricanes is notoriously difficult. Mayfield uses last
season’s Hurricane Lili as a good example of where that process
currently stands. “We had a good track forecast (where Lili
was heading), but not a good intensity forecast—whether it was
building or weakening,” he says. Hurricane Lili weakened from
a Category 4 hurricane to a Category 1 or 2 in the 12 hours before
in made landfall.
Long-range seasonal forecasting is even more difficult. That’s
partly because our weather systems are truly global. What happens
half way around the world can affect our weather. Mayfield acknowledges
that one such factor is the surface temperature of equatorial Pacific
Ocean waters and how it influences El Niño.
“That
is one of the things that we look at to characterize what type of
season we’ll have. There are a lot of people out there making
a seasonal hurricane forecast. Most people were saying that 2002 would
be somewhat below average in part due to the El Niño, but we’re
always very clear about this: It’s not just about numbers.
“What really counts is where they make landfall. We use Hurricane
Andrew as an example. In 1992 we only had six storms, four of which
were hurricanes—again, well below the average numbers—but
yet we had Andrew that made landfall and caused $30 billion in damage.”
That leads to the question we all want to ask: What about the 2003
season? “I give a lot of talks along the coastline to several
of the state hurricane conferences and no matter what I talk about
people always ask about the upcoming season. My answer is that NOAA
(the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is not ready
to release its seasonal forecast yet.
“We’re still
in this El Niño condition, but most of the computer projections
have that dissipating sometime during the hurricane season. NOAA will
issue its first forecast in May, then we’ll update it again
near the first of August.
“The message that we really want
to be clear about is that if you live on the Gulf or Atlantic coasts
of the United States or in the Caribbean, you have to understand that
occasionally you will have a hurricane threat and you need to have
a hurricane plan in place before the hurricane gets there.”
HAVE A PLAN
Hurricane forecasting is advancing as fast as the science develops,
but there remains no such thing as a perfect forecast. Still, that
doesn’t keep Mayfield from striving to better both NHC’s
scientific and communications endeavors.
The NHC, for example, is working toward a five-day forecast. “Customers,”
such as the U.S. Navy, need an accurate four- to five-day forecast
on tropical storms and hurricanes to move men and ships out of harm’s
way. This season, NHC will begin using a five-day model its staff
has been working on.
In terms of safety and communications, Mayfield stresses preparedness.
He notes that a study begun in the 1970s found that most deaths following
a hurricane occur as a result of inland fresh water flooding, although
the potential for large-scale loss of life still is from the storm
surge along the coastline.
One of the biggest problems, he says, is that people living in areas
where there is the threat of a hurricane do not have a plan for what
to do. They must have an emergency plan in place before any hurricane
is predicted. “If you don’t have a plan to make preparations
24 to 36 hours in advance of landfall, you simply don’t have
a plan,” he says.
It’s best to have a close-by place to go, to evacuate to that
will keep you high and dry. Some people say, “Elevation is salvation.”
Mayfield says, “You need friends in high places.”
There are two things Mayfield says residents absolutely must know:
1. Know if you live in a storm surge evacuation area. Know the hazards
you face. Have a place to go. 2. If you live outside a storm surge
evacuation area, you still must have a plan for high winds and rain. |
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