Meteorologists can finally stop throwing out

good data on hurricanes

December 18, 2019

By Nicolas Rivero
News curator

Whenever a hurricane begins to brew in the Atlantic, mountains

of data pour into weather models to help meteorologists forecast
where the storm will go and how strong it’ll get.

In one end go observations collected by satellites, hurricane

hunter airplanes, and dropsondes—tennis-ball-tube-sized devices
dropped through a storm to take measurements at different
altitudes. Predictions about the storm’s path and intensity come
out the other end.

But although we’ve gathered vast troves of storm data since the
late 1950s, at the start of this decade, hurricane models used
almost none of it. As Hurricanes Irene, Isaac, and Sandy passed
by—leaving nearly $100 billion in damage in their wake—the best
meteorologists could do was fit a few dropsonde data points into
their models.

“We’ve been flying through these storms for years collecting

observations and all that stuff fell on the floor,” said Frank Marks,
who leads NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program. “In
the last five or six years we’ve really started making use of that
information.” By the time Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Michael
rolled around, data from airborne radars and satellite microwave
sensors were shaping the forecasts splashed across weather
watchers’ TV screens.

Faster computers and stronger weather models developed

throughout the 2010s have allowed meteorologists to make major
improvements in data assimilation—the process of using real-
world observations to improve hurricane models’ predictions.
That’s one of the factors that have reduced the average error in
hurricane forecasts by two-thirds in the last 25 years. Now,
meteorologists are working to exploit new sources of hurricane
data to make forecasts even more accurate.

A tempest in a terabyte
Data assimilation is a complicated and resource-intensive
computing problem. NOAA’s Hurricane Ensemble Data
Assimilation System runs on a 1,500-core processor and churns
through 10 terabytes of data to make sense of hundreds of
thousands of observations, every six hours. “The big bottleneck is
computing power,” said Jason Sippel, who develops data
assimilation systems for NOAA. “It’s expensive, and there are only
so many dollars to go around.”

The other major challenge has been improving hurricane models

enough that they can handle the incoming real-world data. In
2011, the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF)
model, the major US hurricane model, could represent one data
point for every 5.6 miles (9 km). But the eye of a hurricane
is usually 20-40 miles (30-65 km) wide, so no matter how much
data meteorologists recorded from the all-important center of the
storm, only a small handful of points could fit into their model.

Because of these limitations, the HWRF model only started

incorporating data from doppler radars mounted on the tails of
hurricane hunter planes in 2013. Limited uses of satellite data and
“high density” plane observations (that is, a reading every few
kilometers instead of a few data points for every flight) didn’t
make it into the model until 2017. And just last year, the model
started using dropsonde data from the roiling inner core of
hurricanes.

“I think we’re in an exciting time in terms of our computing

capabilities,” said Robert Nystrom, a meteorology researcher at
Pennsylvania State University. “There’s a lot of room for
improvement in the near future as we begin to pull all these
different types of observations together.”
Eyes in the sky
In the next decade, meteorologists will work on bringing new
streams of data into their models, especially from satellites.
Weather satellites have the advantage of being able to take
frequent snapshots of storms, unlike hurricane hunter jets that
only fly every six hours.

Satellites may not be able to take direct observations from inside

the storm, but they can measure infrared light, which gives them
an indirect measure of air temperature, and microwaves, which
offer clues about the structure of the storm. Unfortunately, both of
these bands of light tend to get scattered and distorted by clouds
and rain—which hurricanes have in spades—leading to noisy data
that’s difficult to use.

In July, Penn State researchers demonstrated a new method for

cleaning up and using infrared data, which they showed would
have more accurately predicted the destruction of 2017’s
Hurricane Harvey, one of the costliest hurricanes in history. The
team drew their infrared observations from a new, high-powered
constellation of NASA satellites called GOES-16, which came
online in 2017. But Sippel, the NOAA data assimilation developer,
says it’ll likely be another three years before meteorologists can
use observations from GOES-16 in working models.

Further improvements could come from incorporating

observations from CYGNSS, a NASA satellite constellation that
launched in 2017 and can measure surface winds over the ocean,
and TROPICS, a planned constellation of cubesats that will excel
at reading microwaves, Sippel added. But he predicts that figuring
out how to clean up that data will take another decade. “We’re not
exploiting satellite data nearly as much as we could be,” Sippel
said.

But meteorologists see these challenges as a cause for hope.

“We definitely believe that by capitalizing on these studies and

making effective use of satellite data we can improve initial
conditions and improve forecasts,” said Vijay Tallapragada, who
runs the modeling and data assimilation branch of the US
National Weather Service. “That is the last missing link in our
capabilities to improve hurricane forecasts.”
Quartz Daily Brief

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