October 2003
Hurricane Team Work
By Dr. Tony Phillips
On a gray breezy day last month thousands of people got in their cars and
reluctantly left home. U.S. east coast highways were thick with traffic. Schools
were closed. Businesses shut down.
Perfect!
When powerful Hurricane Isabel arrived some 38 hours later nearly everyone in
the storm's path had fled to safety.
Days later Vice Admiral Lautenbacher, in a briefing to President Bush, praised
the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA): "Without NOAA's
excellent track forecasts, hurricane Isabel's toll on lives and property would
have been even more devastating. This is NOAA's first year of providing 5-day
forecasts-and the 5-day forecast for Isabel was as good as our 2-day forecasts
have been over the last decade."
Many people in NOAA played a role. A team of pilots, for instance, flew
Gulfstream-IV High Altitude Surveillance jets right up to the approaching
hurricane, logging 25,000 miles in the days before landfall. Their jets deployed
devices called dropsondes-little weather stations that fall toward the sea,
measuring pressure, humidity, temperature and wind velocity as they plummet. The
data were radioed back to the aircraft and transmitted to forecasters on shore.
While two Gulfstream-IV crews flew night and day around the storm, a NOAA
satellite named GOES-EAST monitored Isabel from above. (GOES is short for
Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite.)
From an orbit 22,300 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, GOES-EAST had a unique
view. "It could see the entire hurricane at once," says Ron Gird of NOAA.
"Scientists used infrared spectrometers onboard the satellite to estimate the
height of the storm clouds, their temperature and water content. GOES can also
measure the temperature of the ocean surface-the source of power for
hurricanes."
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| GOES-East satellite image of hurricane Isabel as it makes landfall on September 18, 2003 at 1715 UTC. |
Constant streams of data from GOES and the
Gulfstream aircraft were fed to supercomputers at NOAA's Environmental Modeling
Center in Maryland where sophisticated programs, developed over the years by
meteorologists and programmers, calculated the storm's most likely path.
Supercomputers. Satellites. Jet airplanes. Scientists. Programmers. Pilots. It
took a big team using a lot of tools to predict where Isabel would go-accurately
and with time to spare.
Says Vice Admiral Lautenbacher: "I hope everyone at NOAA shares the pride of
being part of a team effort that so effectively warned the public of impending
danger and enabled citizens to take action to protect themselves and their loved
ones."
Well done, indeed.
To learn more about the GOES, see
www.oso.noaa.gov/goes/. For kids, the SciJinks Weather Laboratory at
http://scijinks.nasa.gov has lots of fun
activities and fascinating facts about the wild world of weather.
This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.