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April 2, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150402161650.htm | TRMM satellite makes direct pass over Super Typhoon Maysak | The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite delivered a remarkable image of Super Typhoon Maysak on March 31. TRMM obtained an image straight over the top of a super typhoon with a double eye-wall, Super Typhoon Maysak, as it roared through the warm waters of the West Pacific south of Guam. This image with the TRMM Precipitation Radar or PR was taken at 14:15 UTC (10:15 a.m. EDT) on March 31, 2015 and shows the rain intensities within the very heart of Super Typhoon Maysak as it undergoes an eye wall replacement cycle. | Mature, intense tropical cyclones can and often do undergo what is known as an eyewall replacement cycle wherein a new eye wall or ring of convection within the outer rain bands forms further out from the storm's center, outside the radius of the original eye wall, and begins to choke off the original eye wall, starving it of moisture and momentum. Eventually, if the cycle is completed, the original eye wall dissipates and this new outer eye wall can contract and replace the old eye wall. The storm's intensity can fluctuate over this period, initially weakening as the inner eye wall dies before again strengthening as the outer eye wall contracts. Eye wall replacement cycles are hard to forecast.Here TRMM provided a look at a classic eye wall replacement cycle in progress. At the very center is the eye of Super Typhoon Maysak, which is devoid of rain where air is descending. Immediately surrounding the eye is the original inner eye wall where air is rising in convective updrafts and releasing heat through condensation. The vast amounts of heat being released into the storm as a result is known as latent heating and is what drives the storm's circulation. The inner eye wall is identified by the nearly complete ring of very intense rainfall with rates on the order of 100 mm/hr or more (~4 inches/hr, shown by the white areas inside the light purple) in the southwestern semicircle. Outside of the inner eye wall is a very distinct ring of very weak rain (~5 mm/hr or less, shown in blue), known as the moat. The moat marks the area between the inner and outer eye walls where air that has already risen through the updrafts in the eye walls is now subsiding, suppressing rain. Next, outside of the moat is the new outer eye wall, shown by the nearly perfect concentric ring of moderate (shown in green) to heavy (shown in red) rain rates. Additional bands of light to moderate rain (blue and green areas, respectively) wrap around the northeast quadrant Maysak.Another key aspect of Maysak's features as revealed by TRMM is their near perfect symmetry around the storm's center. This is a clear sign of the storm's intensity. The more intense the circulation, the more uniformly rain features are wrapped around the center. Indeed, at the time this image was taken by TRMM, Maysak's maximum sustained winds were estimated to be 140 knots (~161 mph) by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, making it a Category 5 super typhoon (equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane on the U.S. Saffir-Simpson scale).Maysak is the first super typhoon of the season in the Northwest Pacific Basin. The storm is forecast to weaken before approaching the northern Philippines in the next couple of days. TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 31, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150331175912.htm | Better method for forecasting hurricane season | A better method for predicting the number of hurricanes in an upcoming season has been developed by a team of University of Arizona atmospheric scientists. | The UA team's new model improves the accuracy of seasonal hurricane forecasts for the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico by 23 percent. The team's research paper was published online in the journal "Our model is better at predicting the number of seasonal hurricanes in the Atlantic than the other existing models," said first author Kyle Davis, a master's student in the UA atmospheric sciences department. "On average, our model has 23 percent less error for predicting hurricanes occurring since 2001."Hurricanes are storms with maximum wind speeds in excess of 73 mph and are among the most damaging natural disasters in the U.S. The Atlantic hurricane season lasts from June 1 to Nov. 30.The UA model can provide its forecast by the start of hurricane season, which allows people to prepare better for the upcoming season, Davis said. "Tens of millions of people are threatened by Atlantic hurricanes. It affects their properties, it affects their lives."The team developed the new model by using data from the 1950 to 2013 hurricane seasons. They tested the new model by seeing if it could "hindcast" the number of hurricanes that occurred each season from 1900 to 1949."It performed really well in the period from 1949 to 1900," Davis said. "That's the most convincing test of our model."Other investigators have estimated that damages from U.S. hurricanes from 1970 to 2002 cost $57 billion in 2015 dollars -- more than earthquakes and human-caused disasters combined for the time period.Better seasonal predictions can help cities and governments in emergency management planning, said co-author Xubin Zeng, who holds the Agnese N. Haury Chair in Environment and is a UA professor of atmospheric sciences.The paper, "A new statistical model to predict seasonal North Atlantic hurricane activity," by Davis, Zeng and Elizabeth A. Ritchie, a UA atmospheric sciences professor, is scheduled for print publication in a future issue of the journal of Good forecasts of hurricane seasons have been around only since the early 1980s, Zeng said. The historical average in the 20th century was six hurricanes per year.Until about the late 1990s, the existing models did a good job of predicting how many hurricanes would occur each year. However, in the 21st century the number of hurricanes per season became more variable, with 15 occurring in 2005 but only two in 2013.Zeng wondered why the computer models didn't work well anymore, and his new graduate student Davis, an actuary, wanted to study natural disasters because of their impact."Xubin steered me into hurricane forecasting," Davis said.Zeng challenged Davis to develop a hurricane forecasting model that surpassed the existing ones."It was a tremendous effort -- trying endless combinations of things, new creative ways of doing things," Davis said.The other forecasting models relied heavily on the state of the El Niño climate cycle, a three-to-seven-year cycle that affects weather all over the globe.One of the UA team's innovations was using the state of a longer-term climate cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to judge how much influence El Niño has in a particular year.The AMO affects ocean temperatures, cycling from colder to warmer and back over a time scale of approximately 40-70 years. The AMO was in a warm phase from the late 1920s to the early 1960s and started cycling back toward warm in the late 1990s. Warmer sea surface temperatures generally generate more hurricanes.Zeng suggested also including the force of the wind on the ocean -- an innovation that, to the best of the team's knowledge, no other statistical model used. Strong winds reduce sea surface temperatures because they mix the ocean layers, thereby bringing cooler, deeper water to the surface.After much trial and error, Davis met Zeng's challenge. The model Davis developed does a better job of forecasting the Atlantic hurricane season by incorporating the force of the wind on the ocean and the sea surface temperature over the Atlantic. The model includes the effect of El Niño only for years when the AMO is in the cool phase.Compared with the other models, the UA model de-emphasized the role of El Niño when the AMO is in the warm phase, as it has been for the past 15 years.Next the team plans to examine the forecasting models for the eastern Pacific hurricanes -- the ones that hit Baja California and the western coast of Mexico and Central America. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 30, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150330162429.htm | Research links two millennia of cyclones, floods, El Niño | Stalagmites, which crystallize from water dropping onto the floors of caves, millimeter by millimeter, over thousands of years, leave behind a record of climate change encased in stone. Newly published research by Rhawn Denniston, professor of geology at Cornell College, and his research team, applied a novel technique to stalagmites from the Australian tropics to create a 2,200-year-long record of flood events that might also help predict future climate change. | A paper by Denniston and 10 others, including a 2014 Cornell College graduate, is published this week in the journal Denniston is one of few researchers worldwide using stalagmites to reconstruct past tropical cyclone activity, a field of research called paleotempestology. His work in Australia began in 2009 and was originally intended to focus on the chemical composition of the stalagmites as a means of reconstructing past changes in the intensity of Australian summer monsoon rains. But Denniston and his research team found more than just variations in the chemical composition of the stalagmites they examined; they discovered that the interiors of the stalagmites also contained prominent layers of mud."Seeing mud accumulations like these was really unusual," Denniston said. "There was no doubt that the mud layers came from the cave having flooded. The water stirred up the sediment and when the water receded, the mud coated everything in the cave -- the floor, the walls, and the stalagmites. Then the stalagmites started forming again and the mud got trapped inside."The stalagmites were precisely dated by Denniston, Cornell College geology majors, and Denniston's colleagues at the University of New Mexico. Once the ages of the stalagmites were known, the mud layers were measured. Angelique Gonzales '14, who worked with Denniston on the research and is third author on the paper, examined nearly 11 meters of stalagmites, measuring them in half millimeter increments and recording the location and thickness of mud layers. This work gave the team more than 2,000 years of data about the frequency of cave flooding.But the origins of the floods were still unclear. Given the area's climatology, Denniston found that these rains could have come from the Australian monsoon or from tropical cyclones."We were sort of stuck," Denniston said, "but then I started working with Gabriele." Gabriele Villarini, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Iowa and the second author of the paper, studies extreme meteorological events, what drives the frequency and magnitude of those events, and their impact on policy and economics. With Denniston and Gonzales, Villarini examined historical rainfall records from a weather station near the cave."The largest rainfall events, almost regardless of duration, are tied to tropical cyclones," Villarini said.Next, they compared flood events recorded in a stalagmite that grew over the past several decades to historical records of tropical cyclones. This analysis revealed that timing of flood events in the cave was consistent with the passing of tropical cyclones through the area. Thus, the researchers interpreted the flood layers in their stalagmites largely as recording tropical cyclone activity.The resulting data tell scientists about more than just the frequencies of tropical cyclones in one part of Australia over the past 2,200 years. A major driver of year-to-year changes in tropical cyclones around the world is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which influences weather patterns across the globe. During El Niño events, for example, Australia and the Atlantic generally experience fewer tropical cyclones, while during La Niña events, the climatological opposite of El Niño, the regions see more tropical cyclones."Our work, and that of several other researchers, reveals that the frequency of storms has changed over the past hundreds and thousands of years," Denniston said. "But why? Could it have been due to El Niño? Direct observations only go back about a hundred years, and there hasn't been much variation in the nature of El Niño/Southern Oscillation over that time. Further back there was more, and so our goal was to test the link between storms and El Niño in prehistory."Denniston noted that the variations over time in the numbers of flood events recorded by his stalagmites matched reconstructed numbers of hurricanes in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean."Tropical cyclone activity in these regions responds similarly to El Niño, and previous studies had also suggested that some periods, such as those when we had lots of flood layers in our stalagmites, were likely characterized by more frequent La Niñas. Similarly, times with fewer storms were characterized by more frequent El Niños." The results of this study mark an important step towards understanding how future climate change may be expressed."It is difficult to use climate models to study hurricane activity, and so studies such as ours, which produced a record of storms under different climate conditions, are important for our understanding of future storm activity," Denniston said.Gonzales, who is planning to pursue a Ph.D. in geology, said that her experience with Denniston and his research, including two senior seminars and an honors thesis, was valuable because she got both field and lab experience as she helped determine not just what had happened in the past, but what that meant."There were a lot of different aspects to put this together -- dating, measuring, literature review, and modeling," she said. "It was really exciting."Denniston is now gearing up to establish a detailed cave monitoring program in this and other regional caves. "We want to extend this study," he said, "to examine what conditions trigger cave flooding."In addition to Denniston, Villarini, and Gonzales, the other authors on the paper were Karl-Heinz Wyrwoll from the University of Western Australia, Victor J. Polyak from the University of New Mexico, Caroline C. Ummenhofer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Matthew S. Lachniet from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Alan D. Wanamaker Jr. from Iowa State University, William F. Humphreys from the Western Australian Museum, David Woods from the Australian Department of Parks and Wildlife, and John Cugley from the Australian Speleological Federation. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 17, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150317162146.htm | Tropical cyclone size controlled by relative sea-surface temperatures | A team of scientists including Minghua Zhang, Dean and Director of Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), have found that the size of tropical cyclones is controlled by their underlying sea-surface temperatures (SST) relative to the conditions of the mean SST within the surrounding tropical zone of the storms. Their findings, published early online in | Scientists believe that the size of cyclones (total rainfall area/radius) is likely controlled by two conditions: the intensity of the storms and the SST. But in this paper, titled "Tropical cyclone rainfall area controlled by relative sea surface temperature," the research team examined relative conditions and found that aspect to be a more accurate predictor of the tropical cyclone size."This research was conducted in the context of climate change, and our findings help us understand what controls the sizes of these storms and what measurement data are needed to better predict the impacted areas they cover," said Professor Zhang, who conducted research on the theoretical explanation of the relationship between the tropical cyclone size and SST."We know that tropical cyclone precipitation will be stronger when sea-surface temperatures are higher, but is not clear whether the stronger precipitation is associated with higher intensity rates or larger areas, or both," explained Dr. Zhang. "Our study showed that if the sea-surface temperatures are uniformly higher around the cyclone region, the cyclone sizes will be similar to the affected tropical zone."The researchers analyzed 1,142 tropic cyclones worldwide by using high resolution space-borne radar and microwave measurements of precipitation aboard NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite and tropical cyclone track data from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship22 program. They investigated the controlling factors of each of the tropical cyclone sizes and found that the relationship of the cyclone sizes with the intensity of the cyclones, combined with the absolute values of SSF together are weak, but the relationship between the relative values of the SST and the cyclone sizes is strong."We were able to also provide a theoretical explanation to this strong relationship with relative SST and confirmed the results in numerical model simulations," added Professor Zhang. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 17, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150317122807.htm | Gulf of Mexico marine food web changes over the decades | Scientists in the Gulf of Mexico now have a better understanding of how naturally-occurring climate cycles--as well as human activities--can trigger widespread ecosystem changes that ripple through the Gulf food web and the communities dependent on it, thanks to a new study published Saturday in the journal | A team of NOAA scientists spent three years reviewing over 100 indicators derived from environmental, fishery, and economic data, including sea surface temperature, currents, atmospheric patterns, fishing effort, harvest, and revenues. Through extensive analysis, they found a major ecosystem reorganization that appeared to be timed with a naturally-occurring climate shift that occurred around 1995.The climate phenomenon is known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), a climate signal in the North Atlantic Ocean that switches between cool and warm phases, each lasting for 20-40 years at a time. The AMO, which was in a cool phase between 1965 until 1995 and has been in a warm phase since, influences global ocean and weather conditions in the northern hemisphere such as hurricane activity in the Atlantic ocean and the severity and frequency of droughts.However, the AMO is not as extensively studied as other climate phenomena, such as El Nino, and this study is the first to investigate what scientists hope will be many future studies examining how the AMO influences ecosystem-scale change in the Gulf. Scientists hope this work will spur interest in further studying this phenomenon and its implications for the marine environment in this region."These major ecosystem shifts have probably gone unrecognized to date because they are not apparent when considering single species or individual components of the ecosystem," said lead investigator Dr. Mandy Karnauskas of NOAA's Southeast Fisheries Science Center. "Only when we put a lot of things together -- including currents, hypoxia, fish abundances, fishing effort, and more -- does a strong climate signal emerge."Additionally, scientists observed shifts in many species around the late 1970s coincident with the advent of the U.S. Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act- a policy designed to set rules for international fishing in U.S. waters, make the expansion of certain fisheries more favorable for economic development, and ensure the long-term sustainability of the nation's fish stocks.Other human influences that are not as pronounced--or easily distinguishable--include coastal development, agricultural runoff, oil spills, and fishing. Natural phenomena like coastal storms and hurricanes play a role as well.The scientists expect their study to be useful to resource managers throughout the Gulf region. While managers cannot control Earth's natural climate cycles, they may need to consider how to alter management strategies in light of them, in order to effectively meet their mandates. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 12, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150312112304.htm | Predicting which African storms will intensify into hurricanes | Hurricanes require moisture, the rotation of Earth, and warm ocean temperatures to grow from a mere atmospheric disturbance into a tropical storm. But where do these storm cells originate, and exactly what makes an atmospheric disturbance amp up full throttle? | A new study published in "85 percent of the most intense hurricanes affecting the U.S. and Canada start off as disturbances in the atmosphere over Western Africa," says Prof. Price. "We found that the larger the area covered by the disturbances, the higher the chance they would develop into hurricanes only one to two weeks later."Using data covering 2005-2010, Prof. Price analyzed images of cloud cover taken by geostationary satellites, which orbit Earth at the precise speed of Earth's rotation and take pictures of cloud cover every 15 minutes. This enabled Prof. Price to track the variability in cloud cover blocking Earth's surface in West Africa between the months of June and November -- hurricane season.The coverage of clouds acts as an indication of atmospheric disturbances. The more clouds in an area, the larger the disturbance. Using infrared cloud-top temperature data gathered from satellites, Prof. Price assessed the temperatures of the cloud tops, which grow colder the higher they rise. He then compared his cloud data with hurricane statistics -- intensity, date of generation, location, and maximum winds --from the same period using the National Hurricane Center data base."We first showed that the areal coverage of the cold cloud tops in tropical Africa was a good indicator of the monthly number of atmospheric disturbances -- or waves -- leaving the west coast of tropical Africa," said Prof. Price. "The disturbances that developed into tropical storms had a significantly larger area covered by cold cloud tops compared with non-developing waves."According to Prof. Price, only 10 percent of the 60 disturbances originating in Africa every year turn into hurricanes. And while there are around 90 hurricanes globally every year, only 10 develop in the Atlantic Ocean."We wanted to know what was so special about these 10% of disturbances that develop into hurricanes. Was there something different about these storms at their genesis?" said Prof. Price. "By looking at each of these storms individually, we found again that the larger the cloud coverage originally in West Africa, the higher the value of the accumulated cyclone energy in a future hurricane. The conclusion, then, is that the spatial coverage of thunderstorms in West Africa can foretell the intensity of a hurricane a week later."If we can predict a hurricane one or two weeks in advance -- the entire lifespan of a hurricane -- imagine how much better prepared cities and towns can be to meet these phenomena head on," Prof. Price says. He is currently examining the thunderstorm clusters around the eyes of hurricanes to study the intensification process of those destructive phenomena. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 5, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150305110539.htm | Yucatan Peninsula hit by tsunami 1,500 years ago, evidence indicates | The eastern coastline of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, a mecca for tourists, may have been walloped by a tsunami between 1,500 and 900 years ago, says a new study involving Mexico's Centro Ecological Akumal (CEA) and the University of Colorado Boulder. | There are several lines of evidence for an ancient tsunami, foremost a large, wedge-shaped berm about 15 feet above sea level paved with washing machine-sized stones, said the researchers. Set back in places more than a quarter of a mile from shore, the berm stretches for at least 30 miles, alternating between rocky headlands and crescent beaches as it tracks the outline of the Caribbean coast near the plush resorts of Playa del Carmen and Cancun.Radiocarbon dates of peat beneath the extensive berm indicate a tsunami, which may have consisted of two or even three giant waves, likely slammed the coastline sometime after A.D. 450. In addition, ruins of Post-Classic Mayan structures built between A.D. 900 and 1200 were found atop parts of the berm, indicating the tsunami occurred prior to that time."I was quite shocked when I first walked these headlands and saw this large berm paved with boulders running long distances in both directions," said CEA scientist Charles Shaw. "My initial thought was that a huge wave came through here in the past, and it must have packed quite a punch."A paper on the subject by Shaw and Larry Benson, an adjunct curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, was published online this week in the The boulders that cover the face and top of the berm are composed of coral and fine-grained limestone, said Benson. "The force required to rip this reef material from the seafloor and deposit it that far above the shoreline had to have been tremendous," he said. "We think the tsunami wave height was at least 15 feet and potentially much higher than that."In addition, the researchers have found "outlier berms," spanning some 125 miles along the Yucatan coastline that suggest the tsunami impacted a very large region. "I think there is a chance this tsunami affected the entire Yucatan coast," said Benson.The berm is composed of two layers of coarse sand as well as both small and large boulders. The beaches between the headland areas contain mostly sandy carbonate material with small boulders that likely were eroded from nearby bays during the event, said Shaw.It is not clear what might have caused the tsunami, which can be triggered by a variety of events ranging from earthquakes and underwater landslides to volcanic eruptions and oceanic meteor strikes. While scientists have found evidence a "super-typhoon" deposited rocky berms on the Australian coastline, the sediments in those berms occur in well-sorted bands, while the Yucatan berm is composed of coarse, unlayered sands suggesting different processes were involved in sediment deposition."If hurricanes can build these types of berms, why is there only a single berm off the Yucatan coast given the numerous hurricanes that have made landfall there over the past century?" said Shaw. "That is a big part of our argument for a tsunami wave. We think we have the pieces of evidence we need for this event to have occurred."Benson and Shaw suggest the tsunami could be more accurately dated by coring mangrove swamp sediments found along the coast in order to locate the carbonate sand deposited by the massive wave, then radiocarbon dating the peaty material above and below the sand.One implication of the Yucatan tsunami is the potential destruction another one could cause. While the geologic evidence indicates tsunamis in the region are rare -- only 37 recorded in the Caribbean basin since 1492 -- the Yucatan coastline, which was only lightly populated by Mayans 1,500 years ago, is now home to a number of lavish resort communities and villages inhabited by some 1.4 million people."If such an event occurs in the future, it would wreak havoc along the built-up coastline, probably with a great loss of life," said Benson. But it's far more likely that powerful hurricanes like the Class 5 Hurricane Gilbert that made landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1988, killing 433 people in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico and causing more than $7 billion in damage, will slam the coastline, said the researchers. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
March 4, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150304104043.htm | Hurricanes helped accelerate spread of lionfish | Just when you thought hurricanes couldn't get any scarier, think again. Their names roll of the tongue like a rogues' gallery: Floyd, Frances, Irene, Wilma and Andrew. But these aren't the names of notorious criminals; rather, they are just a few of the hurricanes since 1992 that have helped spread invasive marine species throughout the Florida Straits. | Researchers at Nova Southeastern University's (NSU) Oceanographic Center have discovered that storms don't only have a dramatic impact on land; they have an equally dramatic effect on ocean currents, which helps the spread of marine invasive species throughout a region. More specifically, NSU researchers looked at the distribution of lionfish in the Florida Straits."This is the first-ever study that shows hurricane-altered ocean currents are able not only to help, but actually accelerate the invasion of non-native marine species of any kind," said Matthew Johnston, Ph.D., one of the research scientists at NSU's Oceanographic Center who conducted the study. "Lionfish are pretty sedentary, so this is like creating express lanes on a superhighway -- otherwise, that's a pretty long swim for lionfish babies."The research, conducted by Johnston and NSU Oceanographic Center Professor Sam Purkis, Ph.D., focused on the explosion of lionfish populations in area waters. Their findings are being published in the journal Not to be too technical, Johnston said that the research focused on how large storms (i.e. hurricanes) affect the flow of water in the Florida Straits. Normally, the currents represent a potential barrier to the transport of lionfish eggs and larvae across the Florida Straits. The researchers found that as a hurricane passes, the flow of water shifts from a strong, northern flow to a strong, eastern flow.It's these changes in flow direction and speed that likely carry lionfish larvae and eggs from Florida to the Bahamas and can explain how lionfish were able to cross the Gulf Stream so soon after their introduction to South Florida waters.Johnston said that once they were established in the Bahamas, hurricanes allowed lionfish to spread quickly against the normal, northwestern direction of water flow in the area. In addition, the storms helped increase the spread of lionfish by approximately 45% and their population size by 15%."The study has broader implications in that global climate change may cause an increase in storm frequency and/or intensity, perhaps further accelerating the spread of marine invasives," Johnston said. "Given that South Florida is a hotspot for marine invasive species, the transport of marine larvae from Florida to the Bahamas on hurricane-altered water flow may become commonplace for invasive and native species alike."Johnston indicated this research has two implications. First, we need to make a concerted effort to prevent marine introductions to begin with and second, we must implement vigorous, early-detection programs to remove these invasive species before they become a problem. Now the team wants to take this research concept and study similar situations in the South Pacific where typhoons are common. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
February 5, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205122801.htm | Satellite science improves storm surge forecasting around the world | A new online resource which will help coastguards, meteorological organisations and scientific communities predict future storm surge patterns has been created, with scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) playing a central role in its development. | The freely-accessible database of storm surge data has been compiled through the multi-partner, international eSurge project, which was launched in 2011 with the aim of making available observational data to improve the modelling and forecasting of storm surges around the world using advanced techniques and instruments.Coastal altimetry, which provides detailed wave and sea level data in the coastal zone captured by specialist instruments called radar altimeters on board satellites, is at the heart of the project and scientists from NOC have been at the cutting-edge of this technique.Raw data collected from altimeters have been re-processed and collated with wind speed data from scatterometers and sea level measurements from tide gauges, to show the spatial structure of each storm. With eSurge, forecasters and scientists can now download these enhanced data and use them for validating their storm surge models and for mapping future storms more accurately.Dr Paolo Cipollini from NOC explained: "When a satellite altimeter overpasses the area affected by a surge, it gives us a unique profile of the water surface level from offshore to the coast, as well as concurrent measurements of wave height. This information is extremely useful to validate the surge models used for forecasts. Even when there doesn't happen to be an overpass at surge time, the statistics of sea level that we got from more than 20 years of repeated altimetric observations in the area can still be combined with data from nearby tide gauges to improve the forecasts of the expected surge."This is the first time that such a detailed level of storm information has been collated and demonstrated as one comprehensive online resource. Data from around 200 storms spanning more than 10 years is now accessible, including major events such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in the USA in 2005, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines -- one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded -- and the major winter storm that caused widespread flooding in the UK in December 2013.The eSurge project, which is funded by the European Space Agency, has also demonstrated the feasibility of offering near-real time data about recent and predicted storms, which can be viewed on the new eSurgeLive web page.Findings of the three year project were presented at a symposium hosted in the Netherlands in January 2015. The partners are now looking at the possibility of extending the project and further developing the eSurge resource into a fully-operational, permanent service in the future.As well as providing and analysing data for the eSurge project, NOC has also played a key role in opening up the findings to a wider global audience. In addition to providing data, scientists at NOC have also helped to build an online storm surge community, which enables scientists, storm modellers and users around the world to be better connected.Head of Marine Physics and Ocean Climate (MPOC) at NOC, Professor Kevin Horsburgh, added: "Storm surges are a global hazard that pose a threat to thousands of lives, and coastal flood forecasting systems can save lives and protect property. Satellite altimetry methods developed at NOC play a crucial role in helping improve storm surge models and map out regional changes in mean sea level."NOC is one of five international organisations involved in the eSurge project, which also includes CGI (UK), the Danish Meteorological Institute (DK), the Coastal and Marine Research Centre (IRL) and the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (NL). | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
January 20, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150120151221.htm | Greenland Ice: The warmer it gets the faster it melts | Melting of glacial ice will probably raise sea level around the globe, but how fast this melting will happen is uncertain. In the case of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the more temperatures increase, the faster the ice will melt, according to computer model experiments by Penn State geoscientists. | "Although lots of people have thought about sea level rise from the ice sheets, we don't really know how fast that will happen," said Patrick Applegate, research associate, Penn State's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.If all the ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, global sea level would rise by about 24 feet. In the last 100 years, sea level in the New York City area has only increased by about one foot. However, storm surges from hurricanes stack on top of this long-term increase, so sea level rise will allow future hurricanes to flood places where people are not ready for or used to flooding. A vivid example occurred during Hurricane Sandy when parts of the New York City subway tunnel system flooded.Greenland might be especially vulnerable to melting because that area of Earth sees about 50 percent more warming than the global average. Arctic sea ice, when it exists, reflects the sun's energy back through the atmosphere, but when the sea ice melts and there is open water, the water absorbs the sun's energy and reradiates it back into the air as heat. Arctic sea ice coverage has decreased over the last few decades, and that decrease will probably continue in the future, leading to accelerated temperature rise over Greenland. Floating ice does not add to sea level, but the Greenland Ice Sheet rests on bedrock that is above sea level.Feedbacks in the climate system cause accelerated temperature rise over the Arctic. Other feedbacks in the Greenland Ice Sheet that contribute to melting include height-melting feedback. A warm year in Greenland causes more melt around the edges of the ice sheet, lowering the surface. The atmosphere is warmer at lower altitudes, so the now lower surface experiences even more melting. This process can lead to accelerated ice melt and sea level rise.Another form of feedback occurs because ice sheets are large masses that want to spread. This spreading can either help preserve the ice sheet by allowing it to adjust to increased temperature or accelerate ice melting by moving ice to lower, warmer, places."Many studies of sea level rise don't take into account feedbacks that could cause rapid sea level rise," said Applegate. "We wanted to look at the effects of those feedbacks."The researchers looked at two models of the Greenland ice sheet that include some of the important feedbacks. The first model is a three-dimensional ice sheet model. The second model looks at a transect across the island and was developed by Byron Parizek, associate professor of geosciences and mathematics, Penn State Dubois. To run both models, Robert Nicholas, research associate, EESI, estimated how much warming might take place over Greenland using results from global climate models.Both the three-dimensional and transect models showed that the time necessary for ice mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet decreases steeply with increases in temperature. Shorter time scales -- faster melting -- imply faster sea level rise. The interplay between the height-melting feedback and ice flow causes this acceleration."Our analysis suggests that the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, in terms of avoided sea level rise from the Greenland Ice Sheet, may be greatest if emissions reductions begin before large temperature increases have been realized," the researchers state in a recent issue of Currently, about a billion people live in areas that would be flooded by a three-foot sea level rise."If we are going to do something to mitigate sea-level rise, we need to do it earlier rather than later," said Applegate. "The longer we wait, the more rapidly the changes will take place and the more difficult it will be to change." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
December 16, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141216100513.htm | Hurricane-forecast satellites will keep close eyes on the tropics | A set of eight hurricane-forecast satellites being developed at the University of Michigan is expected to give deep insights into how and where storms suddenly intensify--a little-understood process that's becoming more crucial to figure out as the climate changes, U-M researchers say. | The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System is scheduled to launch in fall 2016. At the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco this week, U-M researchers released estimates of how significantly CYGNSS could improve wind speed and storm intensity forecasts.CYGNSS--said like the swan constellation--is a $173-million NASA mission that U-M is leading with Texas-based Southwest Research Institute. Each of its eight observatories is about the size of a microwave oven. That's much smaller than a typical weather satellite, which is about the size of a van.The artificial CYGNSS "constellation," as researchers refer to it, will orbit at tropical, hurricane-belt latitudes. Its coverage will stretch from the 38th parallel north near Delaware's latitude to its counterpart in the south just below Buenos Aires.Because of their arrangement and number, the observatories will be able to measure the same spot on the globe much more often than the weather satellites flying today can. CYGNSS's revisit time will average between four and six hours, and at times, it can be as fast as 12 minutes.Conventional weather satellites only cross over the same point once or twice a day. Meteorologists can use ground-based Doppler radar to help them make predictions about storms near land, but hurricanes, which form over the open ocean, present a tougher problem."The rapid refresh CYGNSS will offer is a key element of how we'll be able to improve hurricane forecasts," said CYGNSS lead investigator Christopher Ruf, director of the U-M Space Physics Research Lab and professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences."CYGNSS gets us the ability to measure things that change fast, like extreme weather. Those are the hardest systems to measure with today's satellites. And because the world is warmer and there's more energy to feed storm systems, there's more likelihood of extreme weather."Through simulations, the researchers quantified the improvement CYGNSS could have on storm intensity predictions. They found that for a wind speed forecast that is off by 33 knots, or 38 miles per hour--the average error with current capabilities--CYGNSS could reduce that by 9 knots, or about 10 mph.Considering that the categories of hurricane strength ratchet up, on average, every 20 mph, the accuracy boost is "a very significant number," Ruf said."I'd describe the feeling about it as guarded excitement," he said. "It's preliminary and it's all based on models. People will be really excited when we get up there and it works."The numbers could also improve as scientists update weather prediction tools to better use the new kind of information that CYGNSS will provide.For people who live in common hurricane or typhoon paths, closer wind speed predictions could translate into more accurate estimates of the storm surge at landfall, Ruf said. That's the main way these systems harm people and property."The whole ocean gets higher because the wind pushes the water. That's really hard to forecast now and it's an area we hope to make big improvements in," Ruf said.Researchers expect the satellite system to give them new insights into storm processes. Hurricanes evolve slowly at first, but then they reach a tipping point, says Aaron Ridley, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences."The hurricane could be meandering across the Atlantic Ocean and then something happens." Ridley said. "It kicks up a notch and people aren't exactly sure why. A lot of scientists would like to study this rapid intensification in more detail. With a normal mission, you might not be able to see it, but with CYGNSS, you have a better chance."The satellites will operate in a fundamentally different way than their counterparts do. Rather than transmit a signal and read what reflects back, they'll measure how GPS signals from other satellites bounce off the ocean surface. Each of the eight CYGNSS nodes will measure signals from four of the 32 Global Positioning System satellites.They'll also be able to take measurements through heavy rain--something other weather satellites are, surprisingly, not very good at. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
December 15, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141215113957.htm | Climate change could leave cities more in the dark | Cities like Miami are all too familiar with hurricane-related power outages. But a Johns Hopkins University analysis finds climate change will give other major metro areas a lot to worry about in future storms. | Johns Hopkins engineers created a computer model to predict the increasing vulnerability to hurricanes of power grids in major cities on or relatively near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. They factored historic hurricane information in with plausible scenarios for future storm behavior, given a global rise in average temperatures. With that data, the team could pinpoint which of 27 cities, from Texas to Maine, will become more susceptible to blackouts caused by future hurricanes.Topping the list of cities most likely to see big increases in their power outage risk are New York; Philadelphia; Jacksonville, Florida; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Hartford, Connecticut. Cities at the bottom of the list, whose future risk of outages is unlikely to dramatically change, include Memphis, Tennessee; Dallas; Pittsburgh; Atlanta; and Buffalo, New York.Seth Guikema, an associate professor in the university's Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, said his team's analysis could help metropolitan areas better plan for climate change.Although planning for climate change is difficult due to the high degree of uncertainty about how hurricanes of the future will behave, the team examined a range of potential changes in hurricane activity and quantified how those changes are likely to influence power outage risk. By being able to anticipate these risks, officials have a chance to protect cities against damage and to reinforce their power grids, he said."We provide insight into how power systems along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts may be affected by climate changes, including which areas should be most concerned and which ones are unlikely to see substantial change," Guikema said. "If I'm mayor of Miami, we know about hurricanes, we know about outages and our system has been adapted for it. But if I'm mayor of Philadelphia, I might say, 'Whoa; we need to be doing more about this."The research appears in the December issue of the journal Climatic Change. Johns Hopkins doctoral student Andrea Staid is the report's lead author.Not surprisingly, the team's results depend strongly on location. If climate change indeed intensifies hurricane activity, some areas of the country would feel the impact of it more than others.Cities already in the eye of the storm like Miami and New Orleans would remain so. But cities like New York and Philadelphia as well as some more inland urban areas would likely be increasingly susceptible to more frequent and intense storm activity, the team found. For both New York City and Philadelphia, the 100-year storm scenario, that is, the level of storm impacts expected to be exceeded on average once every hundred years, would be 50 percent higher. More people would lose power more often, and the worst storms would be substantially worse.In that same type of 100-year storm situation, the researchers predict about a 30 percent increase in the number of customers without power in Miami and New Orleans relative to current climate conditions. In more geographically protected cities like Baltimore and Washington, D.C., there would be about a 20 percent increase in the number of customers without power in the 100-year storm."The range of results demonstrates the sensitivity of the U.S. power system to changes in storm behavior," Guikema said. "Infrastructure providers and emergency managers need to plan for hurricanes in a long-term manner and that planning has to take climate change into account."The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation grants 1149460, 1215872, 1331399 and 0968711. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
December 8, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141208144936.htm | Hurricane sandy increased incidents of heart attacks, stroke in hardest hit New Jersey counties | Heart attacks and strokes are more likely to occur during extreme weather and natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. Researchers at the Cardiovascular Institute of New Jersey at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School have found evidence that Hurricane Sandy, commonly referred to as a superstorm, had a significant effect on cardiovascular events, including myocardial infarction (heart attack) and stroke, in the high-impact areas of New Jersey two weeks following the 2012 storm. The study, led by Joel N. Swerdel, MS, MPH, an epidemiologist at the Cardiovascular Institute and the Rutgers School of Public Health, was published in the | Utilizing the Myocardial Infarction Data Acquisition System (MIDAS), the researchers examined changes in the incidence of and mortality from myocardial infarctions and strokes from 2007 to 2012 for two weeks prior to and two weeks after October 29, the date of Hurricane Sandy. MIDAS is an administrative database containing hospital records of all patients discharged from non-federal hospitals in New Jersey with a cardiovascular disease diagnosis or invasive cardiovascular procedure.In the two weeks following Hurricane Sandy, the researchers found that in the eight counties determined to be high-impact areas, there was a 22 percent increase in heart attacks as compared with the same time period in the previous five years. In the low impact areas (the remaining 13 counties), the increase was less than one percent. 30-day mortality from heart attacks also increased by 31 percent in the high-impact area."We estimate that there were 69 more deaths from myocardial infarction during the two weeks following Sandy than would have been expected. This is a significant increase over typical non-emergency periods," said Swerdel. "Our hope is that the research may be used by the medical community, particularly emergency medical services, to prepare for the change in volume and severity of health incidents during extreme weather events."In regard to stroke, the investigators found an increase of 7 percent compared to the same time period in the prior five years in areas of the state impacted the most. There was no change in the incidence of stroke in low-impact areas. There also was no change in the rate of 30-day mortality due to stroke in either the high- or low-impact areas."Hurricane Sandy had unprecedented environmental, financial and health consequences on New Jersey and its residents, all factors that can increase the risk of cardiovascular events," said John B. Kostis, MD, director of the Cardiovascular Institute of New Jersey and associate dean for cardiovascular research at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. "Increased stress and physical activity, dehydration and a decreased attention or ability to manage one's own medical needs probably caused cardiovascular events during natural disasters or extreme weather. Also, the disruption of communication services, power outages, gas shortages, and road closures, also were contributing factors to efficiently obtaining medical care." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
December 5, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141205100025.htm | Climate change already showing effects at Kennedy Space Center | The effects of climate change are already showing up in places from Miami to Alaska, scientists say, but two University of Florida geologists are focusing their attention on one especially noteworthy and vulnerable piece of waterfront real estate: Kennedy Space Center. | What's more, they say, the problem could affect operations at the space center within the next decade."We were a little blind to it, like pre-Katrina New Orleans," said one of the researchers, assistant professor Peter Adams of the UF Geological Sciences department. "Now that we've seen it, we're sensitive to it."Adams and associate professor of geology John Jaeger, who have been studying Cape Canaveral's dunes and beach since 2009, say the impacts became most apparent after Hurricane Sandy."Sandy got a lot of press up north, but it really did a tremendous amount of damage at Cape Canaveral," Jaeger said. "Areas that had previously been relatively stable for decades … suddenly they were gone."Adams said a combination of climate change-related sea-level rise and increased wave energy is almost certainly to blame."Certainly it's occurring now," he said. "Is it affecting NASA infrastructure? The answer is yes."Among the already apparent evidence:• Dunes that historically protected Kennedy Space Center from high seas even during the worst storms were leveled during Tropical Storm Fay in 2008, Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.• A stretch of beachfront railroad track built by NASA in the early 1960s that runs parallel to the shoreline has been topped by waves repeatedly during recent storms. Though idle now -- one vulnerable section has even been removed to make room for protective humanmade dunes the track serves as a useful yardstick for the Atlantic Ocean's growing incursions. One 2010 NASA report predicts it will be permanently breached by 2016.• After Sandy, one washed-out section of shoreline was so close to a launch pad at adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station that a fence surrounding the pad was left teetering and near collapse.Nancy Bray, director of center operations for Kennedy Space Center, said NASA is taking the situation seriously and has plans for dealing with it. A similar plan has been prepared for NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia, though Wallops has not yet seen the effects that have shown up at Kennedy."We do consider sea level rise and climate change to be urgent," she said.The research came about after NASA partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey and UF to figure out why chronic erosion was happening along a roughly 6-mile stretch of beach between launch pads 39A and 39B -- the ones used for Space Shuttle and Apollo missions. The problem had been occurring for years but seemed to be growing worse, beginning with the spate of hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004.Jaeger said he, Adams and doctoral students Shaun Kline and Rich Mackenzie determined the cause was a gap in a near-shore sandbar that funnels the sea toward that section of beach. Faced with the question of what was causing the increased vulnerability in that part of the shoreline, they soon came to the conclusion that the culprits were sea-level rise and wave climate change.As for what could be at risk next, the first item on the list is a two-lane road the runs parallel to and slightly inland from the railroad track. Buried beneath it are electrical power lines and pipelines used to transport liquefied gasses.In the short term, NASA has built new dunes to replace the natural ones that were lost on the threatened section of shoreline. Visitors on tour buses can look out over one of the new dunes from an elevated mound on the beach."Without that secondary dune line, we could have saltwater intrusion at the launch pad," Bray said.Looking further into the future, the agency is taking an approach it calls "managed retreat." That means if sea-level rise becomes insurmountable, Bray said, it may eventually have to move roads, utilities and perhaps even launch pads -- a costly and complex possibility."When you put immovable infrastructure right next to a dynamic environment," Jaeger said, "something has to give." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
December 4, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141204160654.htm | El Niño's 'remote control' on hurricanes in the Northeastern Pacific | El Niño, the abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, is a well-studied tropical climate phenomenon that occurs every few years. It has major impacts on society and Earth's climate - inducing intense droughts and floods in multiple regions of the globe. Further, scientists have observed that El Niño greatly influences the yearly variations of tropical cyclones (a general term that includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. | However, there is a mismatch in both timing and location between this climate disturbance and the Northern Hemisphere hurricane season: El Niño peaks in winter and its surface ocean warming occurs mostly along the equator, i.e., a season and region without tropical cyclone (TC) activity. This prompted scientists to investigate El Niño's influence on hurricanes via its remote ability to alter atmospheric conditions such as stability and vertical wind shear rather than the local oceanic environment.Fei-Fei Jin and Julien Boucharel at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), and I-I Lin at the National Taiwan University published a paper today in Jin and colleagues uncovered an oceanic pathway that brings El Niño's heat into the Northeastern Pacific basin two or three seasons after its winter peak - right in time to directly fuel intense hurricanes in that region.El Niño develops as the equatorial Pacific Ocean builds up a huge amount of heat underneath the surface and it turns into La Niña when this heat is discharged out of the equatorial region. "This recharge/discharge of heat makes El Niño/La Niña evolve somewhat like a swing," said Jin, lead author of the study.Prior to Jin's and colleagues' recent work, researchers had largely ignored the huge accumulation of heat occurring underneath the ocean surface during every El Niño event as a potential culprit for fueling hurricane activity."We did not connect the discharged heat of El Niño to the fueling of hurricanes until recently, when we noticed another line of active research in the tropical cyclone community that clearly demonstrated that a strong hurricane is able to get its energy not only from the warm surface water, but also by causing warm, deep water - up to 100 meters deep - to upwell to the surface," said Jin.Co-author Lin had been studying how heat beneath the ocean surface adds energy to intensify typhoons (tropical cyclones that occur in the western Pacific)."The super Typhoon Hainan last year, for instance, reached strength way beyond normal category 5," said Lin. "This led to a proposed consideration to extend the scale to category 6, to be able to grasp more properly its intensity. The heat stored underneath the ocean surface can provide additional energy to fuel such extraordinarily intense tropical cyclones.""The Northeastern Pacific is a region normally without abundant subsurface heat," said Boucharel, a post-doctoral researcher at SOEST. "El Niño's heat discharged into this region provides conditions to generate abnormal amount of intense hurricanes that may threaten Mexico, the southwest of the U.S. and the Hawaiian islands."Furthermore, caution the authors, most climate models predict a slowdown of the tropical atmospheric circulation as the mean global climate warms up. This will result in extra heat stored underneath the Northeastern Pacific and thus greatly increase the probability for this region to experience more frequent intense hurricanes.Viewed more optimistically, the authors point out that their findings may provide a skillful method to anticipate the activeness of the coming hurricane season by monitoring the El Niño conditions two to three seasons ahead of potentially powerful hurricane that may result. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
November 24, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141124125444.htm | Global warming skeptics unmoved by extreme weather | What will it take to convince skeptics of global warming that the phenomenon is real? Surely, many scientists believe, enough droughts, floods and heat waves will begin to change minds. | But a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar throws cold water on that theory.Only 35 percent of U.S. citizens believe global warming was the main cause of the abnormally high temperatures during the winter of 2012, Aaron M. McCright and colleagues report in a paper published online today in the journal "Many people already had their minds made up about global warming and this extreme weather was not going to change that," said McCright, associate professor in MSU's Lyman Briggs College and Department of Sociology.Winter 2012 was the fourth warmest winter in the United States dating back to at least 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some 80 percent of U.S. citizens reported winter temperatures in their local area were warmer than usual.The researchers analyzed March 2012 Gallup Poll data of more than 1,000 people and examined how individuals' responses related to actual temperatures in their home states. Perceptions of warmer winter temperatures seemed to track with observed temperatures."Those results are promising because we do hope that people accurately perceive the reality that's around them so they can adapt accordingly to the weather," McCright said.But when it came to attributing the abnormally warm weather to global warming, respondents largely held fast to their existing beliefs and were not influenced by actual temperatures.As this study and McCright's past research shows, political party identification plays a significant role in determining global warming beliefs. People who identify as Republican tend to doubt the existence of global warming, while Democrats generally believe in it.The abnormally warm winter was just one in an ongoing series of severe weather events -- including the 2010 Russian heat wave, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines -- that many believed would help start convincing global warming skeptics."There's been a lot of talk among climate scientists, politicians and journalists that warmer winters like this would change people's minds," McCright said. "That the more people are exposed to climate change, the more they'll be convinced. This study suggests this is not the case." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
November 19, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141119142207.htm | NYC residents resumed 'normal' mobility less than 24 hours after Hurricane Sandy | New York City residents' movement around the city was perturbed, but resumed less than 24-hours after Hurricane Sandy, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal | Tropical cyclones, including hurricanes and typhoons, are severe natural disasters that can cause tremendous loss of human life and suffering. Our knowledge of peoples' movements during natural disasters is so far limited due to a lack of data. The authors of this article studied human mobility using movement data from individuals active on Twitter in New York City for 12 days during and after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They analyzed location data attached to over 700,000 tweets from over 53,000 people and mapped each location during 24-hour periods over the 12 days.The researchers observed that peoples' locations covered nearly the entire mapped area and showed similar geographical and statistical distributions to 24-hour periods soon after the hurricane, including areas subject to mandatory evacuation. These results may indicate that New Yorkers were relatively resilient in terms of human mobility during Hurricane Sandy. While resilience could be vital for the city's post-disaster response and recovery, it may also be dangerous if people are moving through mandated evacuation areas during or immediately following extreme weather events like a hurricane. Understanding nuances of human mobility under the influence of such disasters will enable more effective evacuation, emergency response planning, and development of strategies and policies to minimize human fatality, injury, and economic loss. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
November 14, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141114090009.htm | Warmest oceans ever recorded | "This summer has seen the highest global mean sea surface temperatures ever recorded since their systematic measuring started. Temperatures even exceed those of the record-breaking 1998 El Niño year," says Axel Timmermann, climate scientist and professor, studying variability of the global climate system at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa. | From 2000-2013 the global ocean surface temperature rise paused, in spite of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. This period, referred to as the Global Warming Hiatus, raised a lot of public and scientific interest. However, as of April 2014 ocean warming has picked up speed again, according to Timmermann's analysis of ocean temperature datasets."The 2014 global ocean warming is mostly due to the North Pacific, which has warmed far beyond any recorded value and has shifted hurricane tracks, weakened trade winds, and produced coral bleaching in the Hawaiian Islands," explains Timmermann.He describes the events leading up to this upswing as follows: Sea-surface temperatures started to rise unusually quickly in the extratropical North Pacific already in January 2014. A few months later, in April and May, westerly winds pushed a huge amount of very warm water usually stored in the western Pacific along the equator to the eastern Pacific. This warm water has spread along the North American Pacific coast, releasing into the atmosphere enormous amounts of heat--heat that had been locked up in the Western tropical Pacific for nearly a decade."Record-breaking greenhouse gas concentrations and anomalously weak North Pacific summer trade winds, which usually cool the ocean surface, have contributed further to the rise in sea surface temperatures. The warm temperatures now extend in a wide swath from just north of Papua New Guinea to the Gulf of Alaska," says Timmermann.The current record-breaking temperatures indicate that the 14-year-long pause in ocean warming has come to an end. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
November 11, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141111123735.htm | East coast, U.S. hurricanes can flood the Midwest | Located hundreds of miles inland from the nearest ocean, the Midwest is unaffected by North Atlantic hurricanes. | Or is it?With the Nov. 30 end of the 2014 hurricane season just weeks away, a University of Iowa researcher and his colleagues have found that North Atlantic tropical cyclones in fact have a significant effect on the Midwest. Their research appears in the Gabriele Villarini, UI assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, studied the discharge records collected at 3,090 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) stream gauge stations from 1981 to 2011 and found that the effects of North Atlantic tropical cyclones impact large areas of the United States away from Florida, the East Coast and the Gulf Coast."When you hear about hurricanes or tropical cyclones you think about storm surges and wind damage near the coast," says Villarini, who also conducts research at the IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering. "But it's much more than that. Flooding from a single tropical cyclone often impacts 10 to 15 states located hundreds of miles from the coast and covering a wide area."Our results indicate that flooding from tropical cyclones affects large areas of the United States and the Midwest, as far inland as Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan," says Villarini."The USGS stream gauges, located east of the Rocky Mountains, showed that tropical cyclones can cause major flooding over the Midwest, including the southeastern corner of Iowa," he says.Villarini and his colleagues conducted their study by relating maximum water discharges recorded by USGS stream gauges with the passage of the storms over the Midwest and eastern states. Accordingly, they were able to construct maps for each storm that show the relationship between inland flooding and tropical cyclones.Despite these important impacts, inland tropical cyclone flooding has received little attention in the scientific literature, although the news media have begun to pay more attention following Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, he says.Villarini says that the amount of financial damage caused by the storms in the Midwest and the eastern United States will be the subject of a future study. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
October 27, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141027120445.htm | Taxi GPS data helps researchers study Hurricane Sandy's effect on NYC traffic | When Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast in late October 2012, the "superstorm" disrupted traffic in New York City for more than five days, but the evacuation proceeded relatively efficiently with only minor delays, according to transportation researchers at the University of Illinois. The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy offered a chance for Illinois researchers to try out a new computational method they developed that promises to help municipalities quantify the resilience of their transportation systems to extreme events using only GPS data from taxis. (View a 3-minute video showing how traffic affected New York City during Hurricane Sandy. | Dan Work, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Brian Donovan, a graduate student in CEE's Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems program, analyzed GPS data from nearly 700 million taxi trips -- representing four years of taxi travel in New York City -- to determine the city's normal traffic pattern and study the variations during extreme events like the hurricane and snowstorms. The data, routinely recorded by taxi meters, shows travel times and the metered distance for various trips around the city at different times of the day and night. The researchers' method works by computing the historical distribution of pace, or normalized travel times, between various regions of a city and measuring the pace deviations during an unusual event."The first step was to figure out from the data what is normal," Work said. "There is a heartbeat pattern to the city every single day. In the middle of the night when traffic is light, you can get from one side of the city to another very quickly, and every morning during rush hour the roads are congested. The data shows us the typical heartbeat, and then we look for the arrhythmia."A visualization comparing GPS data from New York City taxis in the days surrounding Hurricane Sandy with the same data under normal traffic conditions.A resilient transportation system is one that can weather an extreme event with only minimal damage or service disruption and bounce back to normal relatively quickly, Work said. When cities know how their traffic systems respond to extreme events, they can examine ways to improve them. For example, an unexpected effect of Hurricane Sandy was that the longest traffic delays occurred as people returned to the city to resume their normal activities immediately after the storm, Work said."That was the one surprising piece to us," Work said. "A lot of literature on disasters has been very much focused on how to get people out of the city quickly and safely. It makes sense. But the re-entry process is also important, because you don't want your first responders stuck in gridlock."There is still work to be done to translate this research into improved infrastructure resilience, Work said, but now there is a way to quantify the progress at a city scale."Importantly, this project shows us that the period immediately following the disaster should be the focus of additional research, with the ultimate goal of enhancing post-disaster transportation management and policy," Work said.The researchers obtained the taxi data through a Freedom of Information Law request to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, which already collects it routinely. This gives it advantages over traditional methods for monitoring traffic that rely on sensors in the roadway or video cameras; that equipment can be expensive to deploy throughout a city, Work said."Although the taxi data isn't primed for traffic monitoring purposes because it is so coarse, with the right processing, you can still see things about the city-scale performance that you would expect to observe from a dense network of traditional traffic sensors," Work said."One thing that I think is kind of cool about this project," Donovan said, "is that taxis are designed to just get people from point A to point B, but this is a second use for them. The taxis themselves act as sensors to tell you what's going on in the city."With 700 million records, the size of the data set creates its own set of challenges. One of Donovan's significant contributions to the project involved optimizing the efficiency of the calculations to speed up the analysis, Work said."One of the major challenges when you're dealing with a large data set like this is that you don't want the program to run for 24 hours. In a disaster, that's too long to wait; you need an answer immediately. So you have to design the algorithms appropriately," Donovan said.Donovan, who earned his bachelor's degree in computer science, was drawn to the master's program at Illinois because of the opportunity to work on multi-disciplinary projects like this one, he said. The combination of computer science and transportation systems knowledge is the key to the success of a project like this, Work said."Our background in transportation engineering helped us choose the dataset, clean it, and determine the performance metrics to study," Work said. "At the same time, we needed the right computational tools to be able to process this much data and turn it into actionable information.A paper on this work, "Using coarse GPS data to quantify city-scale transportation system resilience to extreme events," will be published in the Conference Proceedings of the Transportation Research Board in January 2015. A preprint is available online: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
October 21, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141021101013.htm | New methods to calculate risk of floods | University of Adelaide researchers are devising new methods to more accurately estimate long-term flood risk across Australia. | The researchers are examining the possible causes of floods and how they interact with each other. This information is being used to create sophisticated models which will be used by engineers to better calculate flood risks for different locations."In the past, engineers have tended to make decisions as though every flood has just a single cause, for example unusually heavy rainfall or an extreme ocean water level," says Dr Seth Westra, Senior Lecturer in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering."Multiple causes and how they interact have rarely been considered but, ironically, many big floods that have occurred in Australia have been extremely complex, with many different things happening at the same time."For instance, Dr Westra says, the devastating Queensland floods of 2011 superficially appeared to be caused by intense rainfall, but the flood wouldn't have had been so large if the catchments hadn't already been waterlogged from a very wet spring."Accurate assessment of the risk of floods in any particular area is important for town planning and council zoning and in designing flood protection infrastructure like bridges and levees," says Dr Westra."But properly understanding the risk of flooding means we have to assess the likelihood of these different events coinciding -- acting together in a synergistic way to cause an extreme flood. For example do you tend to get big storm surges at the same time as heavy rainfall?"Even when something has never happened in the past, it's possible that the elements could align in a different way in the future to cause a flood event. Think of Hurricane Sandy in the US, which was brought about by the combination of an extremely unusual set of conditions to wreak havoc in New York. We need to be able to assess what sorts of floods can possibly occur in the future, even if we haven't observed or recorded similar events."In Australia, this estimation is complicated further by the fact that we don't have great long-term records of flood risk. We're a relatively new country and in a lot of catchments there may only be 30 years of good data -- so we have to make educated guesses as to what might be possible in the future."Climate change is adding another dimension to the difficulty of flood risk estimation. "Under climate change, each risk factor will probably change in the future -- but it will be a complex picture, much more nuanced than is often reported," says Dr Westra."Certainly some places will see increased floods, but other locations could even see a reduction in flood risk." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
October 8, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141008131601.htm | Mangroves protecting corals from climate change | Certain types of corals, invertebrates of the sea that have been on Earth for millions of years, appear to have found a way to survive some of their most destructive threats by attaching to and growing under mangrove roots. | Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and Eckerd College recently published research on a newly discovered refuge for reef-building corals in mangrove habitats of the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than 30 species of reef corals were found growing in Hurricane Hole, a mangrove habitat within the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument in St. John.Corals are animals that grow in colonies, forming reefs over time as old corals die and young corals grow upon the calcium carbonate or limestone skeletons of the old corals. Coral reefs make up some of the most biologically diverse habitats on Earth, and face many threats such as coastal pollution, dredging and disease. However, some of their most widespread threats involve warming ocean temperatures, solar radiation and increased ocean acidification.It is from these threats that corals are finding refuge under the red mangroves of Hurricane Hole. Red mangroves, subtropical or tropical trees that colonize coastlines and brackish water habitats, have networks of prop roots that extend down toward the seafloor, and corals are growing on and under these roots.Mangroves and their associated habitats and biological processes protect corals in a variety of ways.Bleaching occurs when corals lose their symbiotic algae. Most corals contain algae called zooxanthellae within their cells. The coral protects the algae, and provides the algae with the compounds they need for photosynthesis. The algae, in turn, produce oxygen, help the coral to remove waste products, and, most importantly, provide the coral with compounds the coral needs for everyday survival. When corals are under prolonged physiological stress, they may expel the algae, leading to the condition called bleaching.When examining corals for this study, researchers found evidence of some species thriving under the mangroves while bleaching in unshaded areas outside of the mangroves. Boulder brain corals, for example, were found in abundance under the mangroves and were healthy, while many of those in unshaded areas a short distance away were bleaching.Organisms throughout the world are threatened as climate and other conditions change. If they can find ways to adapt, as it appears these coral have, they can continue to survive as part of an invaluable piece of this world's intricate ecological puzzle. It is not known how many other mangrove areas in the world harbor such a high diversity of corals, as most people do not look for corals growing in these areas. No coral reefs have been identified to date that protect from rising ocean temperatures, acidification and increased solar radiation like these mangrove habitats in St. John. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
September 24, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140924112956.htm | New mobile solar unit is designed to save lives when the power goes out | Brooke Ellison draws her own power from will, but the ventilator that keeps her alive requires uninterrupted electricity. Dr. Ellison, Director of Education and Ethics at Stony Brook University's Stem Cell Research Facility and Associate Director of the Center for Community Engagement and Leadership Development, is allowing scientists to field-test, at her home, the Nextek Power Systems STAR, a mobile solar generator with battery storage. The testing focuses on potential equipment changes needed to secure FDA approval as a medical-grade, uninterrupted, clean-energy power resource for emergency situations like Superstorm Sandy or other disastrous events when power outages are rampant. | Stony Brook is teaming with Dynamic Supplier Alignment, Inc. (DSA) -- under a National Science Foundation and Department of Energy grant -- to conduct the trial at Dr. Ellison's home. The team is led by Principal Investigator Dr. Miriam Rafailovich, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science, and Wayne Gutschow, Vice President of Engineering for Nextek Power Systems. With the help of colleagues at the SBU Advanced Energy Research & Technology Center (AERTC) and SBU engineering students, the group will test the device to identify the minimum amount of storage needed to sustain the home's critical loads during periods when the grid, conventional fossil-fuel generator, and solar power are not available."People who depend on mechanical ventilators -- breathing machines -- for survival are severely impacted by prolonged power outages," says Dr. Ellison, who is paralyzed from the neck down from a childhood accident. "Vent-dependent individuals rely on power for their every breath. Technologies like this will have a direct impact on their safety and survival," adds Dr. Ellison, who also cofounded the Stony Brook University VENTure think tank, an initiative in which SBU researchers and faculty volunteer time to work on projects and develop ideas for ventilator users.The STAR project began with the 2013 SBU Garcia Summer Research Scholars Program. Research participants included Weida Zhang, a senior chemical and molecular engineering student at Stony Brook, and Alex Tang, a senior at Interlake High School in Bellevue, WA -- who was inspired after a Dr. Ellison lecture about the experience of people on life-support systems during Hurricane Sandy.When the storm made landfall on Long Island in 2012, some 90% of Long Island Power Authority customers lost power at some point in time. For those relying on home-use medical devices, especially life-sustaining equipment, the issue of a backup power source for use during emergencies became a life-threatening vulnerability. This was compounded by the likelihood of equipment failure -- with fuel generators operating continuously over long periods of time -- and the fuel shortages that occurred in the aftermath of the hurricane's havoc. The issue seemed to "sneak up" on emergency officials, as better medical treatments and healthcare technologies have helped more people avoid hospitals and institutional settings and remain in their homes.The idea to test a back-up sustainable energy source for individuals who rely on life-saving equipment took hold. Dr. Rafailovich and colleagues thought the opportunity to work with Dr. Ellison with her home as a "living laboratory" would be a major step to bring such a technology and device to fruition. The project has become one that drives home the interplay between scientific research, industry, education, engineering, and the ability to make a difference in people's lives."It's a pleasure to participate in a venture that brings laboratory research into the home with the help of industrial developers," says Dr. Rafailovich. Adds SBU student researcher Zhang, "Having an opportunity to work with a company on a project with real-world applications is something many students seek but never get."About the STAR unit and the field test The STAR unit is composed of six solar panels, two sets of four absorbed glass mat (AGM) batteries, a wattmeter, a Pure Sine inverter, a solar charge controller, and a photometer, assembled into a mobile trailer unit. It is designed to integrate multiple power sources, with smart-sensing electronics to detect grid status and the power available from a distributed network of sources. It will provide continuous charging to an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) that networks into the household grid power and supports critical life-support systems in the home.The field test will hook up the inverter to the targeted loads. The inverter is configured to accept power from a grid source; this allows the unit to charge the batteries when there is no sun. When the grid fails, the circuit will be supported by solar and batteries. If neither solar, battery, or grid is available, a backup fossil-fuel generator will power the house and recharge the batteries. Data logging during the field test will record performance and the viability of the setup.The SBU/industry research team will calculate the best size for the power inverter -- which changes direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC) -- to reduce efficiency loss during the transition from batteries to grid. The researchers will optimize the solar capacity (sizing the panel array to minimize fossil-fuel generator use), the charge controls, and the battery stack. With additional funding, the team will address a next-generation system for Smart Grid applications, and certification for full deployment. Further plans include insertion of SBU invented proprietary fuel-cell enhancement technology and improved lower cost higher performing solar cell technology, slated for commercialization in a new venture (STAR Solutions, Inc.) planned to operate under the Clean Energy Business Incubator Program (CEBIP) and START-UP NY (SUNY Tax-free Areas to Revitalize and Transform Upstate NY) initiative. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
September 23, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140923131444.htm | Record of thousands of years: Mega-storm surge in Florida | The observational hurricane record for northwestern Florida is just 160 years long, yet hurricane activity is known to vary strongly over thousands of years. Digging back into the prehistorical hurricane record, Lin et al. find that scientists' reliance on such a narrow slice of observations has led them to sorely underestimate the frequency with which large hurricanes have slammed into Florida's Gulf Coast. | Based on historical records, northwestern Florida gets hit by a hurricane packing a five-meter (16-foot) storm surge every 400 years. Incorporating long-term paleohurricane records, the authors find that the frequency of such a storm is actually closer to every 40 years.When strong storms batter the shore, waves can carry sediment far inland. Digging down into the sediment record, researchers can reproduce the occurrence of past storm surge. Using a hurricane model and storm surge sediment observations, the authors calculated the intensity and frequency of past hurricanes in Florida's Apalachee Bay. They find that while the frequency of hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast has remained relatively the same over the past few thousand years, the storms' average intensities have been, at times, much higher than during the past 160 years.Based on their paleohurricane storm surge observations, the authors suggest that, historically, northwestern Florida would see a storm surge of 6.3 meters (20.7 feet) every 100 years, 8.3 meters (27.2 feet) every 500 years, and 11.3 meters (37.1 feet) in a worst case scenario event. A storm surge of eight meters (26 feet), they say, would push tens of kilometers inland.The authors suggest that assessments of hurricane risk in other coastal regions may also be biased by relatively short observational records, though the direction and magnitude of that bias is not obvious. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
September 18, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140918130312.htm | NASA HS3 instrument views two dimensions of clouds | Looking out the window of a commercial plane during takeoff is like taking the nickel tour of the profile of the atmosphere. As the plane ascends, what may start as a gloomy day on the ground, can turn into rain streaking across the window as you pass through the white-gray cloud, and then sunny skies above once the plane reaches cruising altitude. | NASA's Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) instrument, flying aboard an unmanned Global Hawk aircraft in this summer's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3, mission, is studying the changing profile of the atmosphere in detail to learn more about how hurricanes form and strengthen."CPL profiles the atmosphere to get a two-dimensional picture of cloud and aerosols, from the top down," said Matt McGill of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the instrument team that designed and built the CPL. Its data, presented as if it were a curtain hanging from the sky, shows what's in the atmosphere's different layers.From about 60,000 feet on the Global Hawk, twice the altitude of a commercial plane, 94 percent of the atmosphere lies below the instrument. The lidar works by sending rapid pulses of light that, like a radar beam, bounce and scatter off any particles they encounter, such as cloud droplets or dust particles. Some of the scattered light returns to the instrument where it records how long it took for the photons to leave and return -- giving the altitude of the particles.CPL sends out 5,000 pulses of light per second in three different wavelengths, allowing the science team to discriminate between different types of particles, McGill said. "Is it a cloud made of water? Is it a cloud made of ice or mixed [water and ice]? And we can say something about what type of airborne particle we are seeing. Is it dust or smoke or pollution?"For the scientists studying hurricanes, those distinctions are important. One of the major areas of study is how Saharan dust off of Africa travels across the Atlantic and affects hurricane formation and intensification. CPL data have been used to verify model projections of Saharan dust in the tropics. The CPL data showed dust layers had a vertical distribution different than models predicted. Instead dust layers occupied narrower altitude ranges. The finding led to an improvement in the dust models, which then feed into hurricane models.Situated in the nose of the Global Hawk flying over the storm environment, CPL also has a role in on-the-fly mission planning. While in flight, the CPL sends its data back to the team on the ground. "The mission scientists involved in the flight planning can sit there and watch the data with us in real time and say, 'Oh, we're not getting what we want.' Then they can go work with the flight planners and pilots to reroute the aircraft into different areas," said McGill. "They love that."The airborne science community takes full advantage of the quick look capability, as well as the 24-hour turn around for the final data products. CPL is one of the most flown instruments in NASA's Earth science fleet. "It's a workhorse for the field campaigns," said McGill.The original CPL was built in 1999 and took its first flight on the ER-2 high altitude research aircraft in 2000. Over the years CPL has been used as a satellite simulator for ground validation efforts, a cloud spotter for other instruments needing a clear view of the ground, as well as the main data collector for scientists studying atmospheric composition and Earth's energy budget where thin clouds and aerosols are major players. The lidar was also part of the proof of concept flights for the A-Train, a series of satellites flying in the same orbit making near-simultaneous measurements of the Earth system using many different instruments. That proof of concept airborne campaign showed scientists the power of combining multiple Earth observing data sets.In 2007, when talk began of using Global Hawks for Earth science, CPL was among the first sensors considered; its size is perfect for the instrument compartment. Worries about the untested Global Hawk led to a second nearly identical instrument being built for use on the unmanned aircraft. It flew on NASA's maiden Global Hawk Pacific campaign in 2009. Since then, the Global Hawk CPL has flown in two multi-year campaigns, alternating between the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX) and HS3.Compact and fully autonomous, the CPL lidar design pioneered photon-counting technology that has led to the development of two instruments that will fly in space, the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), which launches to the International Space Station this December, and the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), which will fly on the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) scheduled to launch in 2017.The solid design of the instrument has borne up surprisingly well over the years, said McGill, who uses CPL as a learning tool for interns and young scientists getting their hands dirty in the field. Together, the twin CPL instruments have flown 26 missions. HS3 will mark the 27th overall and the seventh for the Global Hawk CPL."It's still going strong," McGill said.The HS3 mission is funded by NASA Headquarters and overseen by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and is one of five large field campaigns operating under the Earth Venture program. The HS3 mission also involves collaborations with partners including the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Laboratory, NOAA's Hurricane Research Division and Earth System Research Laboratory, Northrop Grumman Space Technology, National Center for Atmospheric Research, State University of New York at Albany, University of Maryland -- Baltimore County, University of Wisconsin and University of Utah. The HS3 mission is managed by the Earth Science Project Office at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The aircraft are maintained and based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
September 16, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140916182227.htm | New instruments to learn about hurricane form and strength | Looking out the window of a commercial plane during takeoff is like taking the nickel tour of the profile of the atmosphere. As the plane ascends, what may start as a gloomy day on the ground, can turn into rain streaking across the window as you pass through the white-gray cloud, and then sunny skies above once the plane reaches cruising altitude. | NASA's Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) instrument, flying aboard an unmanned Global Hawk aircraft in this summer's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3, mission, is studying the changing profile of the atmosphere in detail to learn more about how hurricanes form and strengthen."CPL profiles the atmosphere to get a two-dimensional picture of cloud and aerosols, from the top down," said Matt McGill of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the instrument team that designed and built the CPL. Its data, presented as if it were a curtain hanging from the sky, shows what's in the atmosphere's different layers.From about 60,000 feet on the Global Hawk, twice the altitude of a commercial plane, 94 percent of the atmosphere lies below the instrument. The lidar works by sending rapid pulses of light that, like a radar beam, bounce and scatter off any particles they encounter, such as cloud droplets or dust particles. Some of the scattered light returns to the instrument where it records how long it took for the photons to leave and return -- giving the altitude of the particles.CPL sends out 5,000 pulses of light per second in three different wavelengths, allowing the science team to discriminate between different types of particles, McGill said. "Is it a cloud made of water? Is it a cloud made of ice or mixed [water and ice]? And we can say something about what type of airborne particle we are seeing. Is it dust or smoke or pollution?"For the scientists studying hurricanes, those distinctions are important. One of the major areas of study is how Saharan dust off of Africa travels across the Atlantic and affects hurricane formation and intensification. CPL data have been used to verify model projections of Saharan dust in the tropics. The CPL data showed dust layers had a vertical distribution different than models predicted. Instead dust layers occupied narrower altitude ranges. The finding led to an improvement in the dust models, which then feed into hurricane models.Situated in the nose of the Global Hawk flying over the storm environment, CPL also has a role in on-the-fly mission planning. While in flight, the CPL sends its data back to the team on the ground. "The mission scientists involved in the flight planning can sit there and watch the data with us in real time and say, 'Oh, we're not getting what we want.' Then they can go work with the flight planners and pilots to reroute the aircraft into different areas," said McGill. "They love that."The airborne science community takes full advantage of the quick look capability, as well as the 24-hour turn around for the final data products. CPL is one of the most flown instruments in NASA's Earth science fleet. "It's a workhorse for the field campaigns," said McGill.The original CPL was built in 1999 and took its first flight on the ER-2 high altitude research aircraft in 2000. Over the years CPL has been used as a satellite simulator for ground validation efforts, a cloud spotter for other instruments needing a clear view of the ground, as well as the main data collector for scientists studying atmospheric composition and Earth's energy budget where thin clouds and aerosols are major players. The lidar was also part of the proof of concept flights for the A-Train, a series of satellites flying in the same orbit making near-simultaneous measurements of the Earth system using many different instruments. That proof of concept airborne campaign showed scientists the power of combining multiple Earth observing data sets.In 2007, when talk began of using Global Hawks for Earth science, CPL was among the first sensors considered; its size is perfect for the instrument compartment. Worries about the untested Global Hawk led to a second nearly identical instrument being built for use on the unmanned aircraft. It flew on NASA's maiden Global Hawk Pacific campaign in 2009. Since then, the Global Hawk CPL has flown in two multi-year campaigns, alternating between the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX) and HS3.Compact and fully autonomous, the CPL lidar design pioneered photon-counting technology that has led to the development of two instruments that will fly in space, the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), which launches to the International Space Station this December, and the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), which will fly on the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) scheduled to launch in 2017.The solid design of the instrument has borne up surprisingly well over the years, said McGill, who uses CPL as a learning tool for interns and young scientists getting their hands dirty in the field. Together, the twin CPL instruments have flown 26 missions. HS3 will mark the 27th overall and the seventh for the Global Hawk CPL."It's still going strong," McGill said.The HS3 mission is funded by NASA Headquarters and overseen by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and is one of five large field campaigns operating under the Earth Venture program. The HS3 mission also involves collaborations with partners including the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Laboratory, NOAA's Hurricane Research Division and Earth System Research Laboratory, Northrop Grumman Space Technology, National Center for Atmospheric Research, State University of New York at Albany, University of Maryland -- Baltimore County, University of Wisconsin and University of Utah. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
September 15, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140915114245.htm | New way to predict hurricane strength, destruction | A new study by Florida State University researchers demonstrates a different way of projecting a hurricane's strength and intensity that could give the public a better idea of a storm's potential for destruction. | Vasu Misra, associate professor of meteorology and co-director of the Florida Climate Institute, and fourth-year doctoral student Michael Kozar introduce in the Monthly Weather Review of the American Meteorological Society a new statistical model that complements hurricane forecasting by showing the size of storms, not just the wind speed.The model predicts the amount of integrated kinetic energy within Atlantic tropical cyclones. This kinetic energy metric is related to the overall size and strength of a storm, not just the maximum wind speed. Predictions of this metric complement existing forecasting tools, potentially allowing forecasters to better assess the risk of hurricanes that make landfall."We don't perceive this to be an alternative to how storms are explained to the public, but a complement," Misra said.Hurricane forecasts have traditionally focused on wind speeds as measured through the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. For example, a storm that has wind speeds of 74 to 95 miles per hour would be called a Category 1 storm. A hurricane with wind speeds of 157 miles per hour or higher would be listed as a Category 5.However, some of the most destructive hurricanes to hit the United States have been labeled a Category 1 or Category 2 because of their slower wind speeds.Hurricane Ike, for example, was a category two storm when it made landfall in 2008, meaning it had maximum sustained winds of 96 to 110 miles per hour. Despite the modest rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, Hurricane Ike caused widespread destruction because it was such a large storm."When the National Hurricane Center says Category 1, the attitude by the public is that it's fine and they can live through it," Misra said. "But, the damage by flooding is typically more widespread in larger storms."Added Kozar: "It's the wind that gets all the attention, but it's the flooding that causes much of the damage."Kozar and Misra's work thus far has focused on using data on storms dating back to 1990. The next step in their research is to focus on real-time weather prediction, so they can show the model in action.The research is supported by funding from NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
August 22, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140822094053.htm | Challenges faced by nurses in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy | Many recall the dramatic images of nurses at New York University's Langone Medical Center (NYULMC) heroically evacuating over three hundred patients, carrying many including the youngest and most vulnerable down flights of stairs during the power outage resulting from the storm surge generated by Hurricane Sandy. | Now, a recent study by researchers at the New York University Colleges of Nursing (NYUCN) and of Dentistry (NYUCD), published in The mixed method study, "Challenges of Nurses' Deployment to Other New York City Hospitals in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy," is one of only a few to evaluate the psychological toll on nurses working in such rapidly changing, uncontrolled, and potentially dangerous circumstances. The researchers conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a sample of 16 nurses, reflecting the diversity of practice areas, nursing experience, and organizational role in the disaster. Subsequently, 528 NYULMC nurses completed an on-line quantitative survey about their Hurricane Sandy experiences. The study identified multiple challenges associated with the post-evacuation deployment to other area hospitals."We found that more than half of the deployed nurses surveyed (54%) characterized their deployment as extremely or very stressful, and many of these nurses remained on these interim assignments for up to two months," said lead author Nancy Van Devanter, DrPH, RN, EdM, FAAN, an associate professor at NYUCN specializing in health services research.The qualitative interviews revealed several psychosocial and practice-based challenges including: working in an unfamiliar environment; limited orientation time; legal concerns; and issues related to assignments. Only 30% of nurses surveyed thought they received a "sufficient" orientation to the host hospital. Further complicating matters, several nurses described situations where they were assigned to more patients than they felt they could safely care for."We saw that the immediacy of the natural disaster limited opportunities for host hospitals to provide deployed nurses with a comprehensive orientation," said Christine T. Kovner, PhD, RN, FAAN, study co-author and NYUCN professor. "This caused the nurses a great deal of stress and concern over a lack of familiarity with the host hospital's documentation systems, equipment, policies, and procedures."While the separation from their co-workers was also a significant stressor for the nurses, the researchers noted that the nurses made specific efforts to keep in touch during the deployment period. One participant elaborated on the extent of their communication during that time saying, "I talked to my coworkers on the phone more in those three months than I talked to them on the phone in almost five years that I've worked here.""Another aim of our research was to identify resources that helped nurses deal with their stress during the ordeal," said co-author Victoria H. Raveis, MA, MPhil, PhD, research professor and director, Psychosocial Research Unit on Health, Aging and the Community at NYUCD. "The study showed that peer support served as a major mode of stress reduction. Almost every participant in the qualitative study touched upon the importance of the support their NYULMC peers provided in adjusting to the deployment experience."The researchers also found that support from NYULMC supervisors helped alleviate the deployed nurses' stress. Because nurse managers had no formal role once their nurses were deployed, they developed creative advocacy and communication strategies to provide needed support for their staff.The researchers' findings will be used to inform policies that facilitate in future disaster response supporting skilled nurses' participation in deployment in a more effective and meaningful way."Our findings will allow us to advocate for the establishment of formal structures to enhance opportunities for nurses deployed during disasters to interact and work with some of their peers, especially when it is not possible to deploy intact teams to host hospitals," said Van Devanter.The authors of this study cite the need for further research to identify challenges experienced by nurses from the host hospitals and from the other hospitals that were evacuated as a result of Hurricane Sandy, adding that such research could further inform regional and national planning, procedure, and policy development to facilitate deployment and address patient surge for future disasters. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 29, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140729084542.htm | Gasses from Kilauea volcano affected tropical storm Flossie formation | One might assume that a tropical storm moving through volcanic smog (vog) would sweep up the tainted air and march on, unchanged. However, a recent study from atmospheric scientists at the University of Hawai'i -- Mānoa (UHM) revealed that, though microscopic, gasses and particles from Kilauea volcano exerted an influence on Tropical Storm Flossie -- affecting the formation of thunderstorms and lightning in the sizeable storm. | In July 2013, as Flossie approached the Hawaiian Islands, satellites steadily monitored lightning, rainfall, cloud cover, temperature and winds. In addition, UHM graduate assistant Andre Pattantyus and UHM Atmospheric Science Professor Dr. Steven Businger dutifully maintained their vog model -- a forecasting tool Businger has operated since 2010 to provide guidance on the location of the vog plume and the concentrations of sulfur dioxide (SOIn assessing the vog model, "We noticed the curious spiral pattern of vog being entrained into Hurricane Flossie and decided to dig deeper by looking at satellite and lightning data sets," said Businger, co-author of the study.He and lead author Pattantyus found that prior to Flossie's passage over the island of Hawai'i, the observation network detected no lightning in the storm. Though one hour later, vigorous lightning flashed in the vicinity of the Island of Hawaii as Flossie approached. Further, as volcanic emissions were wrapped into this moist environment, sulfate aerosols promoted the formation of a greater number of smaller than normal cloud droplets, which favored charge separation in the upper cloud region and the occurrence of lightning.Sulfate aerosols have previously been identified as a principal component of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), a necessary ingredient for forming raindrops. But, said Businger, "This is the first interaction between an active, vigorously degassing volcano and a tropical cyclone captured by a vog model run over the Hawaiian Islands -- providing a unique opportunity to analyze the influence of robust volcanic emissions entrained into a tropical storm system."Taken together, the observations and the vog model highlight an intimate interaction between Tropical Storm Flossie and Kilauea's vog plume during the passage of the storm. The observations of Flossie's changing dynamics as it encountered Kilauea's vog has implications for the impact on hurricanes of polluted air as they approach the US mainland coast."The Hawaiian Islands provide a unique environment to study this interaction in relative isolation from other influences," according to Businger. He plans to model the interaction of the vog plume and Hurricane Flossie with a more complex model that integrates chemistry into the predictions to better understand the processes at work in this unique confluence. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 25, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140725110807.htm | Intensity of hurricanes: New study helps improve predictions of storm intensity | They are something we take very seriously in Florida -- hurricanes. The names roll off the tongue like a list of villains -- Andrew, Charlie, Frances and Wilma. | In the past 25 years or so, experts have gradually been improving prediction of the course a storm may take. This is thanks to tremendous advancements in computer and satellite technology. While we still have the "cone of uncertainty" we've become familiar with watching television weather reports, today's models are more accurate than they used to be.The one area, however, where there is still much more to be researched and learned is in predicting just how intense a storm may be. While hurricane hunter aircraft can help determine wind speed, velocity, water temperature and other data, the fact is we often don't know But, thanks to new research being conducted, all that's about to change."The air-water interface -- whether it had significant waves or significant spray -- is a big factor in storm intensity," said Alex Soloviev, Ph.D., a professor at Nova Southeastern University's Oceanographic Center. "Hurricanes gain heat energy through the interface and they lose mechanical energy at the interface."Soloviev is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (UM RSMAS) and a Fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS.) He and his fellow researchers used a computational fluid dynamics model to simulate microstructure of the air-sea interface under hurricane force winds. In order to verify these computer-generated results, the group conducted experiments at the UM's Rosenstiel School Air-Sea Interaction Salt Water Tank (ASIST) where they simulated wind speed and ocean surface conditions found during hurricanes.The study "The Air-Sea Interface and Surface Stress Under Tropical Cyclones" was published in the June 16, 2014 issue of the journal The researchers were surprised at what they found. Under hurricane force wind, the air-water interface was producing projectiles fragmenting into sub millimeter scale water droplets. This process is known from some engineering applications, including rocket science, as the Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability. This new study then looked at how changes in microphysics of the air-sea interface can make a storm grow or weaken in intensity. With wind speed exceeding a Category 1 threshold, the ocean surface unexpectedly became more "slippery."When the wind exceeded Category 3 hurricane force, the "slippery" effect started gradually disappearing and was completely gone at Category 5. The conclusion was that some hurricanes might rapidly intensify to Category 3 and then stay in a "comfortable" zone around Category 3 status. This finding is consistent with the global best-track tropical cyclone statistics on maximum intensity for 1982-2009. So far, these early results showed that physical conditions where the air and the ocean interact must be a vital part of any successful hurricane forecasting model and would help explain, and predict, how a storm might intensify as it moves through across the water based on the physical stress at the ocean's surface.This work has been supported by the NOPP project "Advanced coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean modeling for improving tropical cyclone prediction models" (PIs: Isaac Ginis, URI and Shuyi Chen, UM) and by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) Consortium for Advanced Research on the Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment -- CARTHE (PI: Tamay Özgökmen, UM). GoMRI is a 10-year, $500 million independent research program established by an agreement between BP and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance.The plan is for the team to continue their research and experiments at UM's Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. SUSTAIN facility, which has recently been designed by one of the "We've got more work to do, but this is a great first step," Soloviev said. "But remember, no matter how good we get in predicting a storm's intensity, people in the path need to prepare accordingly regardless of what Category it is -- that's most important." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 22, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140722125343.htm | NASA's HS3 mission spotlight: The HIRAD instrument | The Hurricane Imaging Radiometer, known as HIRAD, will fly aboard one of two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft during NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel or HS3 mission from Wallops beginning August 26 through September 29. | One of the NASA Global Hawks will cover the storm environment and the other will analyze inner-storm conditions. HIRAD will fly aboard the inner-storm Global Hawk and will be positioned at the bottom, rear section of the aircraft."HIRAD's purpose is to map out where the strongest winds are in a hurricane. During its first deployment in 2010 for the GRIP airborne campaign, HIRAD had two interesting hurricane cases, Earl and Karl," said Daniel J. Cecil, the principal investigator for the HIRAD instrument at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama. "We have made improvements to the instrument since then, and are looking forward to the next good case -- out over water, avoiding land of course!"HIRAD is a passive microwave radiometer that was developed at NASA Marshall. A radiometer is an instrument used to measure the power of electromagnetic radiation. Because HIRAD is a passive microwave radiometer it detects microwave radiation naturally emitted by Earth. The radiation HIRAD detects is then used to infer wind speed at the surface of an ocean.The antenna on HIRAD makes measurements of microwaves emitted by the ocean surface that are increased by the storm. As winds move across the surface of the sea they generate white, frothy foam. This sea foam causes the ocean surface to emit increasingly large amounts of microwave radiation, similar in frequency or wavelength, but much lower intensity, to that generated within a typical home microwave oven. HIRAD measures that microwave energy and, in doing so, allows scientists to deduce how powerfully the wind is blowing. With HIRAD's unique capabilities, the two-dimensional structure of the surface wind speed field can be much more accurately determined than current operational capabilities allow.HIRAD provides unique observations of sea surface wind speed, temperature and rain. The data HIRAD gathers will advance understanding and predictability of hurricane intensity. HIRAD's data will also help better determine maximum wind speed and structure of the vortex (spinning center). The region of strongest winds are also much better observed with HIRAD than current capabilities.When HIRAD makes cross track scan, it reads a swath of passive microwave radiation emitted from Earth. HIRAD obtains measurements of rain rates and hurricane-strength winds, even through heavy rain. HIRAD measures rain rates ranging from ~ 5 to 100 millimeters per hour (0.2 to 3.9 inches per hour) and wind speeds ranging from ~10 to 85 meters per second (22.3 to 190.1 miles per hour / 36 to 306 kilometers per hour).The HIRAD instrument provides "brightness temperature data" that is color-coded by the HIRAD team at NASA Marshall. That color-coded data shows areas of falling rain and possible moderate-to-strong surface winds.HIRAD flew aboard a Global Hawk in the 2013 HS3 mission. On Sept. 15, 2013, the HIRAD instrument scanned Hurricane Ingrid from its perch on the NASA Global Hawk. "HIRAD data definitely saw most of the strong wind and heavy rain on the northern and eastern sides of Hurricane Ingrid in the area generally near 23 degrees north latitude and 95 degrees west longitude," Cecil said.NASA's HS3 mission is a collaborative effort that brings together several NASA centers with federal and university partners to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The 2014 flights from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia will take place between Aug. 26 and Sept. 29 during the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season that runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.The HS3 mission is funded by NASA Headquarters and overseen by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and is one of five large field campaigns operating under the Earth Venture program. The HS3 mission also involves collaborations with partners including the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Laboratory, NOAA's Hurricane Research Division and Earth System Research Laboratory, Northrop Grumman Space Technology, National Center for Atmospheric Research, State University of New York at Albany, University of Maryland -- Baltimore County, University of Wisconsin, and University of Utah.For more information on HIRAD, visit: For a story about HIRAD data from 2013's Hurricane Ingrid, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 21, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140721123922.htm | Storm-triggered landslides: Examining causes of devastating debris flow | Storm-triggered landslides cause loss of life, property damage, and landscape alterations. For instance, the remnants of Hurricane Camille in 1969 caused 109 deaths in central Virginia, after 600 mm of rain fell in mountainous terrain in 6 hours. More recently, on 8 August 2010, a rainstorm-induced landslide devastated the Chinese county of Zhouqu, causing more than 1000 deaths. A new modeling study by | Extreme precipitation can be explained by three factors: low-level moisture buildup, conditional instability, and a lifting mechanism. When several factors (e.g., El Niño years, hurricane remnants, lifting mechanisms (e.g., orography, cold fronts, jets, and differential heating from land cover contrast), and weather pattern phase-lock) work in synergy in a region, extreme precipitation may occur.Using a multiple-phase scalable and extensible geofluid model, the author considered geological features of the region, as well as an earthquake, drought, deforestation, and topsoil erosion before the triggering storm. Previously, drought conditions created cracks and crevices in the surface; these cracks and crevices were deepened by the 2008 Another key factor in setting up the conditions for the landslide was human-induced deforestation and topsoil erosion, the study found. The results "underscore the urgency for a high priority program of re-vegetation of Zhouqu County, without which the region will remain exposed to future disastrous, progressive bulking type landslides," the author reports. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 10, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140710183612.htm | New approach to forecast hurricane intensity | New research from University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggests that physical conditions at the air-sea interface, where the ocean and atmosphere meet, is a key component to improve forecast models. The study offers a new method to aid in storm intensity prediction of hurricanes. | "The general assumption has been that the large density difference between the ocean and atmosphere makes that interface too stable to effect storm intensity," said Brian Haus, UM Rosenstiel School professor of ocean sciences and co-author of the study. "In this study we show that a type of instability may help explain rapid intensification of some tropical storms."Experiments conducted at the UM Rosenstiel School Air-Sea Interaction Salt Water Tank (ASIST) simulated the wind speed and ocean surface conditions of a tropical storm. The researchers used a technique called "shadow imaging," where a guided laser is sent through the two fluids -- air and water -- to measure the physical properties of the ocean's surface during extreme winds, equivalent to a category-3 hurricane.Using the data obtained from the laboratory experiments conducted with the support of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GOMRI) through the CARTHE Consortium, the researchers then developed numerical simulations to show that changes in the physical stress at the ocean surface at hurricane force wind speeds may explain the rapid intensification of some tropical storms. The research team's experimental simulations show that the type of instability, known as Kelvin-Helmoltz instability, could explain this intensification.Haus and colleagues will conduct further studies on hurricane intensity prediction in the new, one-of-a- kind Alfred C. Glassell, Jr., SUSTAIN research facility located at the UM Rosenstiel School. The SUrge-STructure-Atmosphere INteraction laboratory is the only facility capable of creating category- 5 level hurricanes in a controlled, seawater laboratory. The nearly 65-foot long tank allows scientists to simulate major hurricanes using a 3-D wave field to expand research on the physics of hurricanes and the associated impacts of severe wind-driven and wave-induced storm surges on coastal structures.The SUSTAIN research facility is the centerpiece of the new $45 million Marine Technology and Life Sciences Seawater Complex at the UM Rosenstiel School where scientists from around the world have access to state-of-the-art seawater laboratories to conduct an array of marine-related research. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 8, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140708132344.htm | NASA-JAXA's new precipitation satellite sees first Atlantic hurricane | The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory flew over Hurricane Arthur five times between July 1 and July 5, 2014. Arthur is the first tropical cyclone of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season. | GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Core Observatory was launched Feb. 27 from Japan and began its prime mission on May 29, just in time for the hurricane season.The five GPM passes over Arthur are the first time a precipitation-measuring satellite has been able to follow a hurricane through its full life cycle with high-resolution measurements of rain and ice. In the July 3 image, Arthur was just off the coast of South Carolina. GPM data showed that the hurricane was asymmetrical, with spiral arms, called rain bands, on the eastern side of the storm but not on the western side.Arthur was born as the first 2014 Atlantic tropical depression on June 30. It strengthened into a tropical storm on July 1 and reached maximum intensity as a Category 2 hurricane on July 4. The storm moved up the U.S. East Coast and made landfall on July 3 at 11:15 p.m. EDT over the Shackleford Banks between Cape Lookout and Beaufort, North Carolina, before swinging northeast over the ocean toward Greenland, where it became an extra-tropical storm on July 5."With these new observations we are able to see fine scale structures of precipitation to about 1,000 feet vertically and 3 miles horizontally. This allows us to measure precipitation regionally and to improve weather forecasting models," said Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland.The GPM Core Observatory's observations of storms like Arthur will also help scientists decipher some of the thorniest questions about hurricanes, such as how and why they intensify. Hurricane intensity is one of the most difficult aspects to predict and is an area of active research that GPM's observations will contribute to, said NASA Goddard hurricane researcher Scott Braun.The spacecraft carries two instruments that show the location and intensity of the rain, which defines a crucial part of the storm structure. The GPM Microwave Imager sees through the tops of clouds to observe how much and where precipitation occurs, and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar observes precise details of precipitation in three dimensions.With the added capability and higher resolution on the new instruments, "hurricane features pop out more. They're sharper, there's more clarity to the structures," said Braun. "Being able to see the structures more clearly may allow for better determination of the structure of the eye wall and rainbands, thereby providing clues about the likelihood of a storm intensifying or weakening."For forecasters, GPM's radiometer and radar data are part of the toolbox of satellite data that they use to monitor tropical cyclones and hurricanes. This toolbox includes data from other low Earth orbit and geostationary satellites."The whole idea here is to use these tools to understand the initial genesis of the tropical cyclone, then to monitor its location, eye structure and intensity as it evolves, and to use that along with our numerical model forecast to generate a five- to seven-day forecast every six hours," said Jeff Hawkins, head of the Satellite Meteorological Applications Section for the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California. His group is an early adopter of GPM data and monitors near-real time tropical cyclones worldwide. They distribute satellite products generated from multiple satellites' data to operational and research users, including the Navy and Air Force's Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii and the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Florida.The addition of GPM data to the current suite of satellite data is timely. Its predecessor precipitation satellite, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, is in the17th year of its operation. GPM's new high-resolution microwave imager data and the unique radar data ensure that forecasters and modelers won't have a gap in coverage.All GPM data products will be released to the public by Sept. 2, 2014. Current and future data sets are available to registered users from NASA Goddard's Precipitation Processing Center website at: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
July 8, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140708121134.htm | NASA's RapidScat to unveil hidden cycles of sea winds | Ocean waves, the hot sun, sea breezes -- the right combination makes a great day at the beach. A different combination makes a killer hurricane. The complex interactions of the ocean and the air above it that can create such different outcomes are not yet fully known. Scientists would especially like to understand the role that the daily heat of the sun plays in creating winds. | In a few months, NASA will send an ocean wind-monitoring instrument to a berth on the International Space Station. That unique vantage point will give ISS-RapidScat, short for the International Space Station Rapid Scatterometer, the ability to observe daily (also called diurnal) cycles of wind created by solar heat.Winds contribute to motion in the ocean on every scale, from individual waves to currents extending thousands of miles. They affect local weather as well as large-scale, long-term climate patterns such as El Niño. Across the tropical Pacific, winds help or hinder local economies by allowing nutrient-rich water to well up from the ocean depths, nourishing marine life to the benefit of coastal fisheries, or blocking its upwelling.Since the hours of daylight are totally predictable, you might expect their influence on winds to be equally obvious. But that's not the case. According to Sarah Gille, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, "There's an enormous amount of diurnal wind variation between 30 degrees north and south of the equator, and we don't understand the timing. It's clear that the winds aren't just triggered every day at noon [when the sun is highest]."Scatterometer observations from satellites have proven invaluable for understanding ocean winds. A scatterometer is a type of radar that bounces microwaves off Earth's surface and measures the strength and direction of return signals. The more uneven the surface, the stronger the return signals. On the ocean, higher winds create larger waves and therefore stronger return signals. The return signal also tells scientists the direction of the wind, because waves line up in the direction the wind is blowing.The reason spaceborne scatterometers haven't helped much with the specific question of daily wind cycles has to do with their orbits. All modern instruments have been in sun-synchronous orbits, in which a satellite is always oriented at the same angle relative to the sun. In this type of orbit, a satellite passes over every location at the same fixed times, for example, 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. over the equator. The resulting data can't throw much light on the question of how winds develop over the course of a day.For six months in 2003, there were two scatterometers of the same type in space, collecting data at different times of day. From that data, Gille and her colleagues were able to recognize some patterns. "We could see, for example, how sea breezes converge over a large body of water like the Mediterranean or Black Sea. It was a nice window into diurnal variability, but we only had six months of data." That's inadequate to observe differences between summer and winter patterns, among other things.In its berth on the space station, the two-year RapidScat mission, built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, will be the first modern spaceborne scatterometer not locked in a sun-synchronous orbit. Each time the space station passes over a spot on Earth, it's at a different time of day than on the previous visit.RapidScat came into being because in 2009, NASA's previous scatterometer mission, an instrument called SeaWinds on the QuikScat satellite, stopped collecting ocean wind data following more than a decade of faithful service. Its antenna rotation mechanism wore out and stopped working. While the SeaWinds instrument itself is still functioning, its view is limited to a very narrow beam.During QuikScat's decade of full operation, the National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center, U.S. Navy, and other users relied on its data (among other data sources) to produce forecasts and warnings of everything from El Niño to hurricanes to iceberg movements. "When QuikScat stopped spinning, the user community began looking at ways to get a scatterometer going again," said Stacey Boland, a RapidScat project systems engineer at JPL.In 2012, NASA's space station program manager offered scientists at JPL a berth for a replacement scatterometer and a free ride into space in 2014 on a scheduled commercial cargo mission to resupply the space station. "The community had extensively evaluated many types of opportunities and was well aware of the benefit of the space station orbit," Boland said.The entire instrument has been designed and built in the two years since then -- hence the adjective "Rapid" in its name. RapidScat's instrument is essentially the same as the durable SeaWinds instrument on QuikScat. RapidScat will give QuikScat's user community the same vital data, and eventually it will supply the long-awaited answers on diurnal winds.Boland explained how the RapidScat data will accumulate to provide those answers. "We get near-complete spatial coverage every two days over the range of latitudes observable from the space station." (The station orbit ranges from 51.6 degrees north to 51.6 degrees south.) "The coverage at any particular spot is at a slightly different local time of day on each orbit. In about two months, we will have sampled 24 hours of local time at each spot."Once RapidScat has gathered enough cycles of observations, Gille said, "When we average the data, it will tell us what the average conditions are and how much of the observed wind looks like a diurnal pattern."Gille added, "We're very interested in putting time into an analysis to understand how diurnal winds change from season to season or year to year. Understanding the variability of these processes is a critical part of understanding weather."For more information about ISS-RapidScat, visit: RapidScat is the third of five NASA Earth science missions scheduled to be launched this year, the most new NASA Earth-observing mission launches in the same year in more than a decade. NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet. For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
June 5, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605083526.htm | Hurricane Sandy no help to Obama in 2012 presidential race, new study suggests | After Mitt Romney was defeated by President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, some political pundits and even Romney himself tried to pin the loss in part on Hurricane Sandy. | Observers, particularly conservatives, believed the storm was an "October surprise" that allowed Obama to use the trappings of his office to show sympathy and offer support for the victims. The devastating storm hit a week before Election Day, killing hundreds and causing more than $50 billion worth of damage.But a new study examining the psychological impact of Sandy on people's voting intentions indicate the storm's influence was basically a washout."Results suggest that immediately following positive news coverage of Obama's handling of the storm's aftermath, Sandy positively influenced attitudes toward Obama, but that by Election Day, reminders of the hurricane became a drag instead of a boon for the president, despite a popular storyline to the contrary," said Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology and the study's author.The study appears in the June/July issue of Two days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall Oct. 29, Hart began surveying likely voters when it became apparent the storm could impact the bitterly contested race between Obama and Romney.Over the course of a week, the nearly 700 voters polled were asked about their exposure to the storm and related media coverage, as well as their voting intentions. Hart randomly assigned around half of each day's sample to think about the hurricane before reporting their voting intentions, so he could compare preference for Obama versus Romney between voters who had been thinking about the storm, and those who had not.Prior to the positive news coverage for Obama on Oct. 31, there was no influence of Sandy reminders on Obama's vote share. This was also true on Nov. 1, the day after his well-publicized embrace with New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie while touring the hard-hit Jersey Shore. It was that appearance in particular that angered Romney supporters since Christie was a Romney surrogate.Obama did receive a slight bump in support from study participants on Nov. 2 and 3 who thought about Sandy before reporting their voting intentions, but by Election Day, this trend reversed, when news coverage of the storm shifted and became more negative, focusing on loss of life, lingering damage and power outages."The data suggest that people going to the polls Nov. 6 with the hurricane on their mind would have been less inclined to vote for Obama," Hart said.Still, that didn't stop a number of pundits from speculating that the storm was a critical factor in Romney's loss by slowing his momentum, despite polling evidence to the contrary. In winning 26 states and collecting 332 electoral votes, Obama received 51.1 percent of the popular vote to Romney's 47.2 percent.Shortly after the election, Romney insisted Sandy played no role in his defeat."I don't think that's why the president won the election," Romney told Fox News, instead blaming his own "47 percent" comments and his inability to connect with minority voters.Six months later, Romney changed his tune."I wish the hurricane hadn't have happened when it did because it gave the president a chance to be presidential and to be out showing sympathy for folks," Romney told CNN.Hart said his study doesn't reflect the whole of the story on Sandy's effect in the 2012 race, but that the results say more about the pundits than the voters."What it says about voters, perhaps, is that it can be difficult to predict or intuit exactly how they are going to process something like Sandy," he said."It depends on a number of variables and the effect may change over even shorter stretches of time. Yet pundits tend to seize on certain 'laws' such as presiding over a disaster makes an incumbent look presidential. But each event like Sandy deserves to be studied as a unique occurrence to help answer questions about the impact of unpredictable, large-scale events as they unfold."In trying to determine whether or how an event affects elections, Hart says that it is important to use experimental approaches to test the influence of "priming," or activating thoughts of different topics, on voters' attitudes, in addition to more traditional polling methodology. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
June 3, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140603135801.htm | Climate change at the movies | Research published in the | Bridie McGreavy and Laura Lindenfeld of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine, have analyzed three films that feature global warming prominently: The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy (2008) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006).The Day After Tomorrow, a drama directed by Roland Emmerich and featuring as its lead, male character a paleoclimatologist who predicts that global warming might actually plunge the planet into a new Ice Age, is simply a search and rescue in which the lead character must make a daring trek across America to get to his son, trapped in the cross-hairs of the sudden global storm.Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy directed by Randy Olson is allegedly a comedy, a mockumentary exploring the chaos surrounding global warming. It blends documentary and reality style in encounters with the silliness of environmental extremism and the seriousness of Hurricane Katrina.An Inconvenient Truth directed by Davis Guggenheim documents Al Gore's campaign to get the issue of global warming recognized internationally.All three films had their critics. All three have their factual errors and distortions. All three have their hidden agendas. None of the films is peer-reviewed science...obviously. Nevertheless, such storytelling does have an impact on popular culture and public perception regarding a given issue. McGreavy and Lindenfeld suggest that dominant representations of race and gender in these films fail to align with the key sustainable development goals of equity, freedom and shared responsibility. Instead, their position as "entertainment" influence s our sense of the world, guides our relationships and may well affect, in a detrimental manner, our collective abilities to create a sustainable future."Scientific consensus on climate change is clear," the team says. "Attention to this issue in mainstream media is likely to grow stronger as the reality of a changing climate comes home." They add that, "Ideological criticism of movie representations is important because it helps us discover how texts align with or differentiate themselves from dominant discourse." They suggest that we need to engage critically with films to understand who is positioned as having the ability to act and how. "It is not just about rational, fact-based reasoning but about making and using films to challenge dominant stereotypes, change social institutions, and empower citizens more broadly," McGreavy says. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
June 3, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140603092604.htm | New look at old forests: Future growth of U.S. forests expected to decline | As forests age, their ability to grow decreases, a new study by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) scientists and colleagues has determined. Since most U.S. forests are maturing from regeneration that began about 100 years ago when extensive clear-cutting occurred, the study suggests the future growth of U.S. forests will decline. | "All forests are in succession: They get old, die (due to fire, insects, hurricane, etc.), and regenerate. This paper improves on a fundamental theory in ecosystem development: How a forest evolves over time. It demonstrates that when a forest gets old, its ability to grow decreases because it takes up less carbon dioxide and sunlight and respires less, just like an animal or human being," says lead author Jianwu (Jim) Tang, an assistant scientist in the MBL Ecosystem Center.The traditional theory had posited that when a forest gets old, it would respire more and use more energy. But Tang and colleagues found both energy production (photosynthesis) and energy consumption (respiration) decrease with age, resulting in an overall decrease in growth rates."Forests are also big carbon sinks that offset, in part, human-induced carbon emissions. Our finding also suggests the forest carbon sink may decrease in the U.S. because of the slowdown in forest growth," Tang says. "In some other countries, young forests could grow faster and take up more carbon dioxide. To mitigate human-induced climate change and global warming, we may either plant more forests in non-forested lands, decrease use of fossil fuels, or do both." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
June 2, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140602155853.htm | Hurricanes with female names more deadly than male-named storms | In the coming Atlantic hurricane season, watch out for hurricanes with benign-sounding names like Dolly, Fay or Hanna. According to a new article from a team of researchers at the University of Illinois, hurricanes with feminine names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than hurricanes with masculine names, apparently because storms with feminine names are perceived as less threatening. | An analysis of more than six decades of death rates from U.S. hurricanes shows that severe hurricanes with a more feminine name result in a greater death toll, simply because a storm with a feminine name is seen as less foreboding than one with a more masculine name. As a result, people in the path of these severe storms may take fewer protective measures, leaving them more vulnerable to harm.The finding indicates an unfortunate and unintended consequence of the gendered naming of hurricanes, which has important implications for policymakers, meteorologists, the news media and the public regarding hurricane communication and preparedness, the researchers say."The problem is that a hurricane's name has nothing to do with its severity," said Kiju Jung, a doctoral student in marketing in the U. of I.'s College of Business and the lead author on the study."Names are assigned arbitrarily, based on a predetermined list of alternating male and female names," he said. "If people in the path of a severe storm are judging the risk based on the storm's name, then this is potentially very dangerous."The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined actual hurricane fatalities for all storms that made landfall in the U.S. from 1950-2012, excluding Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Hurricane Audrey (1957) because they were much deadlier than the typical storm.The authors found that for highly damaging storms, the more feminine the storm's name, the more people it killed. The team's analysis suggests that changing a severe hurricane's name from the masculine "Charley" to the feminine "Eloise" could nearly triple its death toll."In judging the intensity of a storm, people appear to be applying their beliefs about how men and women behave," said Sharon Shavitt, a professor of marketing at Illinois and a co-author of the report. "This makes a female-named hurricane, especially one with a very feminine name such as Belle or Cindy, seem gentler and less violent."In a follow-up set of experiments, Jung and his colleagues examined how the gender of names directly affected people's judgments about storms. They found that people who were asked to imagine being in the path of "Hurricane Alexandra" (or "Christina" or "Victoria") rated the storm as less risky and intense compared to those asked to imagine being in the path of "Hurricane Alexander" (or "Christopher" or "Victor")."This is a tremendously important finding. Proof positive that our culturally grounded associations steer our steps," said Hazel Rose Markus, a professor in behavioral sciences at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research.Hurricanes in the U.S. formerly were given only female names, a practice that meteorologists of a different era considered appropriate given the unpredictable nature of the storms. According to the paper, an alternating male-female naming system was adopted in the late 1970s because of increased societal awareness of sexism.(The names of this year's storms, alternating between male and female names, will start with Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal and Dolly.)Even though the "gender" of hurricanes is pre-assigned and arbitrary, the question remains: Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations?"People imagining a 'female' hurricane were not as willing to seek shelter," Shavitt said. "The stereotypes that underlie these judgments are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women -- they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men.""Such gender biases are pervasive and implicit," said Madhu Viswanathan, a professor of marketing at Illinois and a co-author of the study. "We found that people were affected by the gender of hurricane names regardless of whether they explicitly endorsed the idea that women and men have different traits. This appears to be a widespread phenomenon."Hurricanes kill more than 200 people in the U.S. each year, and severe hurricanes are capable of producing casualties in the thousands, according to the paper. Even with climate change increasing the frequency and severity of storms, hurricane preparedness remains a challenge for officials.Although the negative effect of gender stereotypes is well-known in hiring decisions and other evaluations of women and men, this research is the first to demonstrate that gender stereotypes can have deadly consequences. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
June 2, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140602095534.htm | NASA widens its 2014 hurricane research mission | During this year's Atlantic hurricane season, NASA is redoubling its efforts to probe the inner workings of hurricanes and tropical storms with two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft flying over storms and two new space-based missions. | NASA's airborne Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3 mission, will revisit the Atlantic Ocean for the fourth year in a row. HS3 is a collaborative effort that brings together several NASA centers with federal and university partners to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The flights from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia take place between Aug. 26 and Sept. 29, during the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.The NASA Global Hawks are unmanned aircraft that will be piloted remotely from the HS3 mission control at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Global Hawk aircraft are well suited for hurricane investigations because they can fly for as long as 26 hours and fly above hurricanes at altitudes greater than 55,000 feet.One Global Hawk will focus on the inner region of the storms to measure wind, precipitation, temperature and humidity. It will carry three instruments, including the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR) microwave sounder, developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. The second Global Hawk will carry three different instruments and examine the environment around the storms.The NASA-Japanese Space Agency Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, launched Feb. 27, will provide rainfall measurements every three hours around the globe, and will complement the HS3 mission.The ISS-RapidScat instrument, managed by JPL, is slated for launch to the International Space Station in August. RapidScat will measure ocean surface winds in Earth's tropics and mid-latitudes and will provide useful data for weather forecasting of marine storms.GPM and RapidScat are two of five NASA Earth science missions scheduled to be launched this year, the most new NASA Earth-observing mission launches in the same year in more than a decade. NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.For more information about this year's HS3 campaign, visit: For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
May 22, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140522132807.htm | Near-normal or below-normal 2014 Atlantic hurricane season predicted | In its 2014 Atlantic hurricane season outlook issued today, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is forecasting a near-normal or below-normal season. | The main driver of this year's outlook is the anticipated development of El Niño this summer. El Niño causes stronger wind shear, which reduces the number and intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes. El Niño can also strengthen the trade winds and increase the atmospheric stability across the tropical Atlantic, making it more difficult for cloud systems coming off of Africa to intensify into tropical storms.The outlook calls for a 50 percent chance of a below-normal season, a 40 percent chance of a near-normal season, and only a 10 percent chance of an above-normal season. For the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, NOAA predicts a 70 percent likelihood of 8 to 13 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 3 to 6 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 1 to 2 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher).These numbers are near or below the seasonal averages of 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes, based on the average from 1981 to 2010. The Atlantic hurricane region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico."Thanks to the environmental intelligence from NOAA's network of earth observations, our scientists and meteorologists can provide life-saving products like our new storm surge threat map and our hurricane forecasts," said Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., NOAA administrator. "And even though we expect El Niño to suppress the number of storms this season, it's important to remember it takes only one land falling storm to cause a disaster."Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, said the Atlantic -- which has seen above-normal seasons in 12 of the last 20 years -- has been in an era of high activity for hurricanes since 1995. However, this high-activity pattern is expected to be offset in 2014 by the impacts of El Niño, and by cooler Atlantic Ocean temperatures than we've seen in recent years."Atmospheric and oceanic conditions across the tropical Pacific are already taking on some El Niño characteristics. Also, we are currently seeing strong trade winds and wind shear over the tropical Atlantic, and NOAA's climate models predict these conditions will persist, in part because of El Niño," Bell said. "The expectation of near-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures this season, rather than the above-average temperatures seen since 1995, also suggests fewer Atlantic hurricanes."NOAA is rolling out new tools at the National Hurricane Center this year. An experimental mapping tool will be used to show communities their storm surge flood threat. The map will be issued for coastal areas when a hurricane or tropical storm watch is first issued, or approximately 48 hours before the anticipated onset of tropical storm force winds. The map will show land areas where storm surge could occur and how high above ground the water could reach in those areas.Early testing on continued improvements to NOAA's Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model (HWRF) shows a 10 percent improvement in this year's model compared to last year. Hurricane forecasters use the HWRF along with other models to produce forecasts and issue warnings. The HWRF model is being adopted by a number of Western Pacific and Indian Ocean rim nations.NOAA's seasonal hurricane outlook is not a hurricane landfall forecast; it does not predict how many storms will hit land or where a storm will strike. Forecasts for individual storms and their impacts will be provided throughout the season by NOAA's National Hurricane Center. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
May 22, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140522132505.htm | Near-normal or above-normal Eastern Pacific hurricane season predicted | NOAA's Climate Prediction Center announced today that a near-normal or above-normal hurricane season is likely for the Eastern Pacific this year. The outlook calls for a 50 percent chance of an above-normal season, a 40 percent chance of a near-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of a below normal season. | Seasonal hurricane forecasters are calling for a 70 percent chance of 14 to 20 named storms, which includes 7 to 11 hurricanes, of which 3 to 6 are expected to become major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale).An average Eastern Pacific hurricane season produces 15 named storms, with eight becoming hurricanes and four becoming major hurricanes. The Eastern Pacific hurricane season runs from May 15 through Nov. 30, with peak activity from July through September."The key climate factor behind the outlook is the likely development of El Niño this summer. El Niño decreases the vertical wind shear over the eastern tropical Pacific, favoring more and stronger tropical storms and hurricanes," said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, part of the U.S. National Weather Service. "The eastern Pacific has been in an era of low activity for hurricanes since 1995, but this pattern will be offset in 2014 by the impacts of El Niño."Climate signals point to a potentially active hurricane season for the Eastern Pacific this year, making preparedness more important than ever. The public is encouraged to take time now to learn their personal risk, build an emergency kit and develop a contingency plan in to ensure their resiliency in the face of wind, rain, flooding and storm surge that a hurricane may bring.The outlook is a general guide to the overall seasonal hurricane activity. It does not predict whether, where, or when any of these storms may hit land. Eastern Pacific tropical storms and hurricanes most often track westward over open waters, sometimes reaching Hawaii. However, some occasionally head toward the northeast and may bring rainfall to the arid southwestern United States during the summer or fall. Also, on average, two to three storms per season affect western Mexico or Central America.NOAA's hurricane outlook for the Central Pacific basin calls for a near-normal or above-normal season while the Atlantic basin is expected to be near-normal or below-normal. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
May 22, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140522132139.htm | Near-normal or above-normal Central Pacific hurricane season predicted | NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center announced that climate conditions point to a near-normal or above-normal season in the Central Pacific Basin this year. | For 2014, the outlook calls for a 40 percent chance of a near-normal season, a 40 percent chance of an above-normal season, and a 20 percent chance of a below-normal season. We expect 4 to 7 tropical cyclones to affect the central Pacific this season. An average season has 4-5 tropical cyclones, which include tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes.This outlook is based upon the expectation of El Niño developing during the 2014 hurricane season. El Niño decreases the vertical wind shear over the tropical central Pacific, favoring the development of more and stronger tropical cyclones. Since 1995 the central Pacific has been in an era of low activity for hurricanes, but this pattern will be offset in 2014 by the impacts of El Niño.This outlook is a general guide to the overall seasonal hurricane activity in the central Pacific and does not predict whether, where, when, or how many of these systems will affect Hawaii.NOAA issued its Central Pacific hurricane outlook at a news conference in Honolulu, and urged Hawaii residents to be fully prepared before the hurricane season, which begins June 1 and runs until November 30."I encourage the public to become weather-ready by signing up for weather alerts, developing a family emergency plan, and building an emergency kit before hurricane season begins," said Tom Evans, acting director of NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center. "Now is the time to make sure that you and your family are ready and prepared for the 2014 hurricane season." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
May 14, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140514133432.htm | Dangerous storms: Hurricanes peaking further north, typhoons further south, than in past | Powerful, destructive tropical cyclones are now reaching their peak intensity farther from the equator and closer to the poles, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT scientist. | The results of the study, published today in the journal "The absolute value of the latitudes at which these storms reach their maximum intensity seems to be increasing over time, in most places," says Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor and co-author of the new paper. "The trend is statistically significant at a pretty high level."And while the scientists who conducted the study are still investigating the atmospheric mechanisms behind this change, the trend seems consistent with a warming climate."It may mean the thermodynamically favorable conditions for these storms are migrating poleward," adds Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT.The implications are serious, since the movement of peak intensity means regions further north and south of the equator, which have not previously had to face many landfalls by violent cyclones, may now have greater exposure to these extreme weather events. That, in turn, could lead to "potentially profound consequences to life and property," the paper states. "Any related changes to positions where storms make landfall will have obvious effects on coastal residents and infrastructure."The paper, "The Poleward Migration of the Location of Tropical Cyclone Maximum Intensity," was co-written by Emanuel, James P. Kossin of the University of Wisconsin, and Gabriel A. Vecchi of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).To conduct the study, the scientists used international data from 1982 to 2012, collected by NOAA's National Climactic Data Center. They used the location of peak intensity of cyclones as a benchmark because it is a more consistent metric than statistics such as storm duration: The duration can be harder to estimate because of difficulties in establishing precisely when a storm should first be considered a tropical cyclone.While there are regional differences in the poleward movement of cyclones, the fact that every ocean basin other than the northern Indian Ocean has experienced this change leads the researchers to suggest, in the paper, that this "migration away from the tropics is a global phenomenon."However, Emanuel notes, the global mechanisms underlying the trend are a matter for further research."We think, but have not yet been able to establish, that this is connected to independently observed poleward expansion of the Hadley circulation," Emanuel says, referring to a large-scale pattern of global winds, which in recent years has also moved further poleward. The paper notes the potential impact of vertical wind shear, which inhibits cyclone formation; data suggests a decrease in wind shear in the tropics and an increase at higher latitudes.Emanuel notes that researchers in the field are continuing to examine the links between storm migration and global warming. Over the past three decades, the incidence of cyclones in the tropics has actually diminished -- because while tropical cyclones may become more intense in a warmer climate, it is actually more difficult to generate them.Ocean temperatures between 82 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit seem to be "ideal for the genesis of tropical cyclones," Emanuel says, "and as that belt migrates poleward, which surely it must as the whole ocean warms, the tropical cyclone genesis regions might just move with it. But we have more work to do to nail it down." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
May 8, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140508192505.htm | Hurricanes Katrina, Rita may have caused up to half of recorded stillbirths in worst hit areas | Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have been responsible for up to half of all recorded stillbirths in the worst hit areas, suggests research published online in the | And the true fetal death toll may even be higher, because of the displacement of people whose homes and way of life were destroyed, suggest the authors.Hurricane Katrina struck the state of Louisiana, USA, on August 29 2005, followed by Hurricane Rita a month later on September 24. Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in American history, while Rita was the fourth most intense hurricane ever recorded.Both hurricanes caused widespread damage to property and infrastructure and left a trail of injury, death, and trauma in their wake.The researchers used composite figures from several government agencies, showing that the hurricanes caused damage in 38 out of 64 areas (parishes) in the state, with almost 205, 000 housing units affected.In four parishes, more than half of the local housing stock was damaged; in three others, between 10% and 50% was damaged. Elsewhere, the level of damage to housing stock was categorised as 1%-10%, or less than 1%.The researchers then calculated the odds of a pregnancy resulting in a stillbirth in damaged and undamaged areas (less than 1% damage) in the 20 months before, and the 28 months after, Katrina struck.But they also looked at all birth data between 1999 and 2009 in Louisiana to gauge usual patterns: during this period, 5194 stillbirths were recorded.They then used space-time models to assess whether the extent of damage wrought by the hurricanes was linked to the risk of stillbirths in a given area.Their calculations indicated that the risk of a pregnancy ending in a stillbirth was 40% higher in parishes where 10-50% of housing stock had been damaged, and more than twice as high in areas where over 50% of the housing stock had taken a hit.After taking account of known risk factors, every 1% increase in the extent of damage to housing stock was associated with a corresponding 7% rise in the number of stillbirths.Based on these figures, the researchers calculated that of the 410 stillbirths officially recorded in extensively damaged parishes, up to half (117-205) may have been directly caused by the hurricanes and the subsequent devastation.Their estimates suggest that stillbirths made up around 17.5% to 30.5% of the total death toll in the wake of the hurricanes.But the risk of stillbirth may have been even higher, suggest the researchers. In the hardest hit areas, the number of live births was more than 40% lower in 2007 than it was in 2004. And in parishes with more half of the housing stock damaged, the live birth rate fell by 79% in the three months following Katrina.This "precipitous decline" is likely to reflect the well documented exodus of residents from the coastal parishes of Louisiana into other areas, they suggest.They point to previously published research, showing a link between maternal stress, depression, and trauma and birth complications, including stillbirths.And they warn that climate change scientists have predicted an increase in the frequency, intensity, and duration of North Atlantic tropical cyclones like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita."Insofar as our empirical findings meaningfully generalise in time, the health risks to the unborn and their perinatal development will likely increase with more frequent and intense hurricanes," they write. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
May 1, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140501101224.htm | Climate change to intensify important African weather systems | Climate change could strengthen African easterly waves, which could in turn have consequences for rainfall in the Sahel region of northern Africa, formation of Atlantic hurricanes and dust transport across the Atlantic Ocean. | Weather systems that bring rainstorms to many drought-prone areas of northern Africa, carry Saharan dust across the ocean and seed Atlantic hurricanes could grow stronger as a result of human-caused climate change, a new analysis by Stanford scientists suggests.Known as African easterly waves, or AEWs, these weather systems form above northern Africa during the summer season and travel east to west, toward the Atlantic Ocean."Not only are AEWs important for rainfall in West Africa, they also play a role in climate across the Atlantic, including here in the United States," said Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.The climate of West Africa varies sharply from the wet tropical region along the equator to the very dry Sahara desert in the north. The strip of land that lies between these two extremes, called the Sahel, has experienced some of the most prolonged and severe droughts in the world over the past half century.AEWs travel from east to west across northern Africa along two tracks. One track lies along the southern Sahel and Guinea coast region. The other track follows the border between the northern Sahel and southern Sahara Desert. Along the northern track, the strength of the AEWs is driven largely by the difference in the ground temperature of the Sahara and the relatively cooler surface temperatures over the Sahel and Guinea Coast farther south. The greater the temperature difference, the more potential energy there is for storm systems such as AEWs to draw from.Because AEWs have such a strong influence on the climate in Africa and the Atlantic basin, Diffenbaugh and a graduate student in his lab, Christopher Skinner, wanted to understand how a warming atmosphere might affect the strength and track of AEWs. Their research is detailed in the April 28 issue of the The pair began by analyzing simulations from 17 computer models of interactions between Earth's ocean and atmosphere. Each model was produced by a different research institute, and each one simulates physical processes in a slightly different way."For example, all models need a component that simulates rainfall. There are multiple ways to represent rainfall in a model, and each model does it slightly differently," Skinner said. "By using multiple models we are able to get a better sense of what the possible range of climate responses will be for a given level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."Diffenbaugh and Skinner focused on simulations of AEWs during the period from 1980 to 2005 and simulations of AEWs during a projected future period in which the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly twice what it is today. Although some of the models differed in their simulation of AEWs during the 20th century, nearly all agreed that the winds associated with AEWs would grow stronger by the late-21st century if increases in greenhouse gas emissions continue along their current trajectory.Additionally, all of the models predicted that as greenhouse gases rise, both the Sahara Desert and the Guinea coast region to the south will heat up, but the desert will warm more than the Guinea region."The temperature difference between the desert and the region farther south actually becomes larger than it is today," Skinner said. "Because the strength of the African easterly waves is influenced by the temperature difference between these two regions, we would expect the energy of the AEWs to become larger, and that's what the simulations show."In particular, the models predict a strengthening in the AEWs that travel near the border of the Sahara and the Sahel. This strengthening could have important impacts on precipitation in the drought-prone Sahel region."This is a region that has experienced some of the most severe humanitarian disasters from droughts," Diffenbaugh said. "But there has also been a lot of uncertainty about how global warming could impact rainfall in that region. To see such clear agreement in the response of AEWs to climate change opens the door for increasing our understanding of Sahel precipitation."A strengthening of waves in this region could also mean more uplift and transport of dust out of Africa and across the Atlantic. In the current climate, these dust plumes deliver life-sustaining nutrients to the ocean but also can affect rainfall and air quality as far away as the Caribbean.The authors also note that stronger AEWs could influence hurricanes that form in the Atlantic. The African easterly waves themselves don't become hurricanes, but a wave can create a protective environment in which significant rainfall and vertical wind motion can develop. "This convection can serve as the seed for a hurricane," Skinner said.Not all Atlantic hurricanes are tied to AEWs, but studies have indicated that about 80 percent of the most intense hurricanes are associated with the African disturbances. A stronger AEW could conceivably influence the likelihood that the AEW generates a tropical cyclone, but the authors urge caution in jumping to conclusions."Hurricanes will be affected by global warming through changes in sea surface temperature, wind shear, and other environmental variables," Skinner said. "This is just one piece of a very complicated puzzle, but it's an interesting piece that hasn't really been looked at before." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
April 17, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140417124116.htm | After hurricane Sandy, residents support government mitigation, but not footing the bill | New Jersey residents who were surveyed four months after Hurricane Sandy battered the East Coast of the United States in October 2012 expressed strong support for government policies to reduce the likelihood of severe damage from future hurricanes, according to a study involving 875 residents. Researchers also found, however, that only a small fraction of those surveyed -- about one in five -- were willing to contribute to a fund to pay for implementing the government policies. | Professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty Michael R. Greenberg and five colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey undertook their study to gauge public support for policies such as prohibiting housing in high risk flood zones, requiring houses to be constructed to resist storms, and taking other steps to reduce the vulnerability of areas prone to hurricane and severe weather damage. They also were interested in identifying the factors most strongly associated with a willingness to politically and financially support these and other policies. The authors say that New Jersey is among the most beleaguered states along the East coast, having been inundated by Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Irene in 2011, both of which wreaked massive damage and cost billions of dollars. The other Rutgers University researchers who conducted the study include Marc D. Weiner, Robert Noland, Jeanne Herb, Marjorie Kaplan and Anthony J. Broccoli.For their study, Public Support for Policies to Reduce Risk after Hurricane Sandy, the researchers' survey results found that 53 to 63 percent of respondents favored government policies, such as allowing local government to require disaster-resistant home construction and having federal and state officials designate storm buffer areas as off limits to development. Furthermore, 49 percent favored government financial incentives to rebuild damaged areas in ways that would reduce future risk, and 42 percent supported prohibiting housing in certain areas. Overall, 49 percent of respondents "strongly favored" four or more of seven policy options, while the combined proportion of respondents who either "strongly" or "somewhat favored" one of the options ranged from 61 to 85 percent. The article was recently posted electronically in the journal Risk Analysis, a publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.The researchers found almost all respondents unwilling to pay out of their own pockets for mitigation and other programs. Regarding support for an income tax increase of 1 percent for 5 years, the study found that only 19 percent of respondents strongly supported the tax compared with 68.6 percent who strongly opposed it. Likewise, only 24.2 percent strongly supported a 1 percent increase in the state's sales tax for 5 years, compared with 64.4 percent who strongly opposed that policy option. Only 14.4 percent of respondents supported a 5-cents-per gallon tax on gasoline sales for 5 years, compared with 77.8 percent who strongly opposed the idea. Noting that 52.5 percent of respondents strongly supported a special 1 percent tax on hotels, motels, airports and recreation facilities for 5 years, the authors' comment that "the consensus was to pass the cost to future generations or to visitors, many of whom will not be from the state."Interestingly, residents of the New Jersey Shore area were not more in favor of mitigation programs than other New Jersey residents. Between shore and non-shore respondents, only minimal differences were found in support for government mitigation and resilience actions.In trying to understand what attributes would make respondents most supportive of government policies in response to hurricanes and other such disasters, the researchers focused on issues relating to concerns about climate change and trust in scientists who study it. They also focused on views towards the federal government playing a major role in land use and building management programs.The survey found that 64 percent of respondents agreed that climate change is a risk to them and their family and friends. Perceptions and values concerning climate change proved to be the strongest factor predicting support for government mitigation and resilience policies. At the same time, according to the researchers, their findings do not mean that the policies described in their study and other similar studies will be supported or followed. The authors cite three obstacles that emerged from their research. First, half of the respondents felt that state and local government did not understand the implications of global climate change for their region, and two-thirds did not trust the local news media to inform them about events. Moreover, as in other states, many New Jersey residents expressed a generic distrust of the federal government. The most important long-term constraint is the unwillingness of people to support the establishment of a dedicated fund with their own funds. As time passes, without another major event, support for these policies will decrease. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
March 25, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140325133542.htm | Model now capable of street-level storm-tide predictions | The water that surged into the intersection of New York City's Canal and Hudson streets during Hurricane Sandy -- to choose just one flood-ravaged locale -- was ultimately driven ashore by forces swirling hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. | That simple fact shows not only the scale and power of a tropical cyclone, but the difficulty of modeling and forecasting its potential for coastal flooding on the fine scale needed to most effectively prepare a response.Now, a study led by Professor Harry Wang of William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science demonstrates the ability to predict a hurricane's storm tide at the level of individual neighborhoods and streets -- a much finer scale than current operational methods.The study, published in today's issue of the "Storm-surge modeling is a tough problem," says Wang. "People are interested in the possibility of flooding on a very fine scale, on the order of their house, office, or street." But for a forecast model to work, he says, "We have to resolve the boundary conditions -- -- data on tides and winds -- very far away, out into the open ocean. And we have to have that information far enough beforehand to provide time for people and agencies to respond."Wang and his modeling team -- fellow VIMS researchers Derek Loftis, Zhuo Liu, David Forrest, and Joseph Zhang -- conducted their study by "hindcasting" Hurricane Sandy's landfall along the U.S. Atlantic coast. In this technique, scientists initiate a computer model with data collected before a past event, and then test the model's accuracy by comparing its output with observations recorded as the event unfolded.For their test case, Wang and colleagues first used a large-scale model called SELFE to hindcast Sandy-driven changes in water level along the entire East Coast, from Florida to Nova Scotia. They initialized SELFE by entering data on normal tidal conditions along the model's open-ocean boundary, which is drawn almost 1,500 miles offshore. They allowed the model to "spin-up" for 10 days ahead of Sandy's approach, then another 5 days forward in time once the storm had entered the model grid, adding data on wind speed, wind direction, and air pressure in 6-minute time steps. They derived these data from NOAA's large-scale NAM (North American Mesoscale) model and a separate fine-scale atmospheric model called RAMS. RAMS -- short for Regional Atmospheric Modeling System -- was developed by the Poquoson office of Weatherflow Inc., a private-sector provider of weather data.Wang stresses the importance of a good atmospheric model. "You cannot accurately forecast storm surge without accurate wind forcing," he says. "We are happy to be able to use RAMS, and it seems to be working quite well."Wang says the 6-minute time-step is also key to their model's success. Some storm-surge models resolve time in increments as short as 3 seconds, but doing so requires computing power that exceeds even that available in W&M's SciClone Computing Complex. "A 6-minute time-step allows us to run a 5-day simulation in 40 minutes," says Wang. "That's the kind of rapid run-time you need for forecasting."The second step for Wang's team was to use output from the "large-domain" SELFE model -- which they verified by comparing with actual readings from NOAA tide gauges between Long Island and Chesapeake Bay -- to drive a model of much higher resolution focused on New York City and its harbor. This "sub-grid inundation model" incorporates high-resolution elevation data collected with LIDAR, a mapping technique that uses airborne lasers to map the ground surface to within a few inches of its actual height."High-resolution hydrodynamic models are essential to account for the effects of local features," says Wang. "When water floods into a city, it encounters everything from waterfront berms to streets, railroads, parks, highways, subway stations, bridges, and building of all different kinds." These structures and surfaces not only divert and channel the water, but provide different levels of friction that must be modeled as well.VIMS Dean & Director John Wells calls the results of the team's sub-grid inundation model a "breakthrough" in storm-tide forecasting -- with model output within 6 to 8 inches of the water levels recorded in New York City during Sandy by the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS measured Sandy's flooding by deploying temporary tide gauges at selected sites during the storm, and by sending out teams of observers afterward to record mud and wrack lines on buildings, roadways, and other infrastructure.Says Wang, "Our results compared very favorably with the USGS' Hurricane Sandy Mapper database in terms of timing, area of inundation, and depth of floodwaters. The maximum extent of horizontal inundation was within 30 meters [90 feet] of the USGS values."Animations created by Assistant Research Scientist David Forrest show the accuracy of the sub-grid inundation model in stunning detail. "The animation clearly shows water going around buildings and rushing through the streets," says Wang."What we've achieved is an efficient platform that addresses both large-scale storm tide and high-resolution inundation problems simultaneously," he adds. "Our future plans are to add the many other processes that are at play during a hurricane -- rainfall, filtration, storm-water drainage, and the effect of waves. That's the goal for our future development and further improvements." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
March 18, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140318113634.htm | Rise in heart attacks after Hurricane Katrina persisted six years later | Lingering stress from major disasters can damage health years later, according to a new Tulane University study that found a three-fold spike in heart attacks continued in New Orleans six years after Hurricane Katrina. | Researchers also found a lasting disruption in the timing of heart attacks in the six years after the storm with significantly more incidents occurring on nights and weekends, which are typically times hospitals see fewer admissions for heart attacks.The research, which will be published in the journal "Prior to Hurricane Katrina, about 0.7 percent of the patients we were treating in our medical center were suffering from myocardial infarctions (heart attacks)," said lead author Dr. Matthew Peters, internal medicine resident at Tulane University School of Medicine. "This increased to about 2 percent in first three years after Katrina and continued to increase to almost 3 percent in years four through six after the storm."The hospital had 1,177 heart attack cases during the six years after the storm, representing 2.4 percent of patient admissions; only 0.7 percent of its patients were admitted for heart attacks two years before Katrina.Researchers attribute the increase to several factors, most notably chronic stress, higher unemployment and greater risk factors for heart disease, such as increased rates of smoking, substance abuse, psychiatric disorders and noncompliance in taking prescribed medications."We found more patients without insurance, who were unemployed and more who had a previous history of coronary artery disease, showing us that the milieu of patients was a sicker population," said senior author Dr. Anand Irimpen, an associate professor of medicine for the Tulane Heart and Vascular Institute and chief, cardiology section, Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
March 17, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140317170646.htm | New airborne GPS technology for weather conditions takes flight | GPS technology has broadly advanced science and society's ability to pinpoint precise information, from driving directions to tracking ground motions during earthquakes. A new technique led by a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego stands to improve weather models and hurricane forecasting by detecting precise conditions in the atmosphere through a new GPS system aboard airplanes. | The first demonstration of the technique, detailed in the journal Current measurement systems that use GPS satellite signals as a source to probe the atmosphere rely on GPS receivers that are fixed to ground and can't measure over the ocean, or they rely on GPS receivers that are also on satellites that are expensive to launch and only occasionally measure in regions near storms. The new system, led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography geophysicist Jennifer Haase and her colleagues, captures detailed meteorological readings at different elevations at targeted areas of interest, such as over the Atlantic Ocean in regions where hurricanes might develop."This field campaign demonstrated the potential for creating an entirely new operational atmospheric observing system for precise moisture profiling from commercial aircraft," said Haase, an associate researcher with the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Physics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at Scripps. "Having dense, detailed information about the vertical moisture distribution close to the storms is an important advancement, so if you put this information into a weather model it will actually have an impact and improve the forecast.""These are exciting results, especially given the complications involved in working from an airplane," says Eric DeWeaver, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research. "Satellite-based measurements are now regularly used for weather forecasting and have a big impact, but airplanes can go beyond satellites in making observations that are targeted right where you want them."The GRL paper details a 2010 flight campaign aboard NSF aircraft and subsequent data analysis that demonstrated for the first time that atmospheric information could be captured by an airborne GPS device. The instrumentation, which the scientists labeled "GISMOS" (GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] Instrument System for Multistatic and Occultation Sensing), increased the number of atmospheric profiles for studying the evolution of tropical storms by more than 50 percent."We're looking at how moisture evolves so when we see tropical waves moving across the Atlantic, we can learn more about which one is going to turn into a hurricane," said Haase. "So being able to look at what happens in these events at the early stages will give us a lot longer lead time for hurricane warnings.""This is another case where the effective use of GPS has the potential to improve the forecast and therefore save lives," said Richard Anthes, president emeritus of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which currently runs the satellite based GPS measurements system called COSMIC (Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate).While the current GISMOS design occupies a refrigerator's worth of space, Haase and her colleagues are working to miniaturize the technology to shoe box size. From there, the system can more feasibly fit onto commercial aircraft, with hundreds of daily flights and a potential flood of new atmospheric data to greatly improve hurricane forecasting and weather models.The technology also could improve interpretation of long-term climate models by advancing scientists' understanding of factors such as the moisture conditions that are favorable for hurricane development.Paytsar Muradyan, who recently received a Ph.D. from Purdue University in atmospheric sciences, started working with Haase in 2007 as a graduate student during the formative stages of GISMOS's design and development. She eventually flew with the group in the 2010 campaign and took away a wealth of experience from the demands of the project."It was a lot of responsibility but certainly rewarding to work with a group of world-known scientists in an interdisciplinary project," said Muradyan. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
March 11, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140311184623.htm | Crowdsourced rain samples map Hurricane Sandy's evolution | A unique method to collect rain water samples during Hurricane Sandy has revealed the storm's chemical "signature" with a new level of detail. The technique may also lead to weather model advances that will ultimately improve storm prediction, say researchers at the University of Utah whose study was published online today in | Hurricane Sandy, also known as Superstorm Sandy, was the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, according to government sources. Damage estimates exceed $65 billion and nearly 300 people perished along the path of the storm in seven countries."As the climate changes in the 21st century, there is a possibility that more hurricanes will stray farther north along the eastern seaboard, like Sandy did," says Stephen Good, a postdoctoral fellow in geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, and lead author on the study. "It therefore becomes increasingly important to better understand the processes at work in these large storm systems."To that end, researchers at the U took to the Internet to invite volunteers to collect water samples as the storm passed."During Sandy, we used crowdsourcing to obtain an unprecedented collection of hurricane rain waters," says Gabriel Bowen, associate professor of geology and geophysics, who launched the sampling effort after realizing the storm was on track to impact a large part of the eastern United States. "By taking advantage of data and samples gathered from residents on the ground, we were able to pinpoint where and when key features of the storm system developed and how they evolved, allowing us to develop a more complete picture of the storm."Tropical cyclones, also referred to as hurricanes when they occur over the North Atlantic Ocean, are rapidly rotating storm systems that cause strong winds and heavy rain. They form over large bodies of relatively warm water, deriving their energy from evaporation and eventual condensation of water from the ocean's surface."Sandy left a distinctive isotopic signature in rain collected from the mid-Atlantic up into in New England that shows how a dry cold front originating out of the Midwest joined with Sandy -- which developed from a tropical wave over warm water in the Caribbean -- and likely prolonged and expanded the storm," says Bowen.The sampling technique provides a new way of studying how these "extra-tropical" hurricanes interact with the weather systems of the northern latitudes, and thereby aids in hurricane forecasting and analysis.The team used a variety of electronic means -- including science community email lists, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and crowdsourcing sites -- to alert the public to the study and to solicit samples.For consistency, samples were collected on private property, from well-anchored containers in open, outdoor locations every 12 hours (8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern time).A total of 685 samples were collected from more than 125 volunteers at sites from North Carolina to Indiana to New Brunswick, Canada. The majority of the samples were obtained in regions of the U.S. mid-Atlantic -- where the storm's impact was greatest -- but having samples from the further reaches of the storm was key in allowing the researchers to investigate processes occurring at Sandy's margins.The samples were shipped to the Utah lab in November 2012 and analyzed for their composition of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, which provide a fingerprint of water sources, transport and rainout in the storm.Isotopes are subtly different forms of chemical elements that vary in their weight and, as a result, their physical behavior. For example, heavier isotopes evaporate from liquids less readily and condense out of vapor more readily. As water changes state from liquid to vapor and vice versa, the variations in oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios give researchers a sensitive tool to calculate the hydrologic budget -- that is, the inflow, outflow and storage of water -- of large cyclones.For the analysis of the rain isotope data Bowen and Good teamed up with graduate student Derek Mallia and associate professor John Lin in the U's department of atmospheric sciences. Mallia and Lin made use of a computer model of the atmosphere which was able to "run the tape backwards" and track the source of the rainwater backwards to the locations that contributed moisture to the storm.In this study, exceptionally low levels of the heavy isotope oxygen-18 were found in samples from the southwest area of the storm, tracking extreme losses of water as precipitation neared the storm's center. Using their dense network of samples, the researchers were able to show this signature, which has also been used to reconstruct the occurrence of prehistoric hurricanes, was limited to a narrow region of the storm where the most intense precipitation was found.As Sandy traveled north and its intensity decreased, the oxygen-18 levels moderated. However, levels of another isotope -- deuterium -- increased in parts of the storm when Sandy collided with the dry air from a continental cold front. The researchers argue that this signal shows that the storm picked up more moisture, and energy, from the frontal system and from evaporation off of the Atlantic, which led to intense rainfall over New England."The isotope data give fundamentally different information than can be obtained from satellite imagery or other conventional means of tracking storms," says Good. "Satellite imagery gives you information about the location of clouds and rain, but it cannot tell you where this water, and the energy that it contributes to the storm, came from."Researchers anticipate that as these types of interactions are better documented and further studied, they may lead to advances in weather models that will ultimately improve storm prediction. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
March 10, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140310101700.htm | Aerosols from human activities tend to weaken hurricanes and cyclones | Aerosols in the atmosphere produced from human activities do indeed directly affect a hurricane or tropical cyclone, but not in a way many scientists had previously believed. In fact, they tend to weaken such storms, according to a new study that includes a team of Texas A&M University researchers. | Renyi Zhang, University Distinguished Professor in Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M, and colleagues Yuan Wang, Keun-Hee Lee, Yun Lin and Misty Levy have had their work published in the current issue of The team examined how anthropogenic aerosols -- those produced from human activities, such as from factories, power plants, car and airplane emissions and other forms -- play a role in the development of hurricanes. The team used a complex computer model and data obtained from Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005 and produced catastrophic damage.The researchers found that aerosols tend to weaken the development of hurricanes (tropical storms that form in the Atlantic Ocean) or typhoons (those formed in the Pacific). They also found that aerosols tend to cause a hurricane to fall apart earlier and wind speeds are lower than storms where anthropogenic aerosols are not present.On average, there are about 90 hurricanes or cyclones that form each year around the world, meaning their findings could be crucial in how we evaluate and prepare for destructive tropical storms."The results are surprising," Zhang says, "because other studies have leaned global warming by greenhouse gases makes hurricanes more intense and frequent. We found that aerosols may operate oppositely than greenhouse gases in terms of influencing hurricanes."Another thing we find, however, is that aerosols appear to increase the amount of precipitation in a hurricane or typhoon. The rainbands associated with such tropical storms seem to be larger and stronger."Zhang says the results could prove beneficial in how future hurricanes are studied -- and how important the presence or absence of aerosols impact the development of such storms.Katrina, for example, was the most destructive storm in U.S. history, with damages totaling more than $100 billion and the storm killed more than 1,800 people. Winds topped 175 miles per hour and the storm flooded 80 percent of the New Orleans area."The information produced from this study could be very helpful in the way we forecast hurricanes," Zhang explains."Future studies may need to factor in the aerosol effect. If a hurricane or typhoon is formed in a part of the world where we know that anthropogenic aerosols are almost certainly present, that data needs to be considered in the storm formation and development and eventual storm preparation."Yuan Wang, who conducted the research with Zhang while at Texas A&M, currently works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar.The study was funded by grants from NASA, Texas A&M's Supercomputing facilities and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
February 26, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140226075019.htm | Offshore wind farms could tame hurricanes before they reach land | Computer simulations by Professor Mark Z. Jacobson have shown that offshore wind farms with thousands of wind turbines could have sapped the power of three real-life hurricanes, significantly decreasing their winds and accompanying storm surge, and possibly preventing billions of dollars in damages. | For the past 24 years, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, has been developing a complex computer model to study air pollution, energy, weather and climate. A recent application of the model has been to simulate the development of hurricanes. Another has been to determine how much energy wind turbines can extract from global wind currents.In light of these recent model studies and in the aftermath of hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, he said, it was natural to wonder: What would happen if a hurricane encountered a large array of offshore wind turbines? Would the energy extraction due to the storm spinning the turbines' blades slow the winds and diminish the hurricane, or would the hurricane destroy the turbines?So he went about developing the model further and simulating what might happen if a hurricane encountered an enormous wind farm stretching many miles offshore and along the coast. Amazingly, he found that the wind turbines could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph and decrease storm surge by up to 79 percent.The study, conducted by Jacobson, and Cristina Archer and Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware, was published online in The researchers simulated three hurricanes: Sandy and Isaac, which struck New York and New Orleans, respectively, in 2012; and Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005."We found that when wind turbines are present, they slow down the outer rotation winds of a hurricane," Jacobson said. "This feeds back to decrease wave height, which reduces movement of air toward the center of the hurricane, increasing the central pressure, which in turn slows the winds of the entire hurricane and dissipates it faster."In the case of Katrina, Jacobson's model revealed that an array of 78,000 wind turbines off the coast of New Orleans would have significantly weakened the hurricane well before it made landfall.In the computer model, by the time Hurricane Katrina reached land, its simulated wind speeds had decreased by 36-44 meters per second (between 80 and 98 mph) and the storm surge had decreased by up to 79 percent.For Hurricane Sandy, the model projected a wind speed reduction by 35-39 meters per second (between 78 and 87 mph) and as much as 34 percent decrease in storm surge.Jacobson acknowledges that, in the United States, there has been political resistance to installing a few hundred offshore wind turbines, let alone tens of thousands. But he thinks there are two financial incentives that could motivate such a change.One is the reduction of hurricane damage cost. Damage from severe hurricanes, caused by high winds and storm surge-related flooding, can run into the billions of dollars. Hurricane Sandy, for instance, caused roughly $82 billion in damage across three states.Second, Jacobson said, the wind turbines would pay for themselves in the long term by generating normal electricity while at the same time reducing air pollution and global warming, and providing energy stability."The turbines will also reduce damage if a hurricane comes through," Jacobson said. "These factors, each on their own, reduce the cost to society of offshore turbines and should be sufficient to motivate their development."An alternative plan for protecting coastal cities involves building massive seawalls. Jacobson said that while these might stop a storm surge, they wouldn't impact wind speed substantially. The cost for these, too, is significant, with estimates running between $10 billion and $40 billion per installation.Current turbines can withstand wind speeds of up to 112 mph, which is in the range of a category 2 to 3 hurricane, Jacobson said. His study suggests that the presence of massive turbine arrays will likely prevent hurricane winds from reaching those speeds. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
February 25, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140225101641.htm | Hurricane prediction: Real time forecast of Hurricane Sandy had track and intensity accuracy | A real-time hurricane analysis and prediction system that effectively incorporates airborne Doppler radar information may accurately track the path, intensity and wind force in a hurricane, according to Penn State meteorologists. This system can also identify the sources of forecast uncertainty. | "For this particular study aircraft-based Doppler radar information was ingested into the system," said Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology, Penn State. "Our predictions were comparable to or better than those made by operational global models."Zhang and Erin B. Munsell, graduate student in meteorology, used The Pennsylvania State University real-time convection-permitting hurricane analysis and forecasting system (WRF-EnKF) to analyze Hurricane Sandy. While Sandy made landfall on the New Jersey coast on the evening of Oct. 29, 2012, the analysis and forecast system began tracking on Oct. 21 and the Doppler radar data analyzed covers Oct. 26 through 28.The researchers compared The WRF-EnKF predictions to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Global Forecast System (GFS) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Besides the ability to effectively assimilate real-time Doppler radar information, the WRF-EnKF model also includes high-resolution cloud-permitting grids, which allow for the existence of individual clouds in the model."Our model predicted storm paths with 100 km -- 50 mile -- accuracy four to five days ahead of landfall for Hurricane Sandy," said Zhang. "We also had accurate predictions of Sandy's intensity."The WRF-EnKF model also runs 60 storm predictions simultaneously as an ensemble, each with slightly differing initial conditions. The program runs on NOAA's dedicated computer, and the analysis was done on the Texas Advanced Computing Center computer because of the enormity of data collected.To analyze the Hurricane Sandy forecast data, the researchers divided the 60 runs into groups -- good, fair and poor. This approach was able to isolate uncertainties in the model initial conditions, which are most prevalent on Oct. 26, when 10 of the predictions suggested that Sandy would not make landfall at all. By looking at this portion of the model, Zhang suggests that the errors occur because of differences in the initial steering level winds in the tropics that Sandy was embedded in, instead of a mid-latitude trough -- an area of relatively low atmospheric pressure -- ahead of Sandy's path."Though the mid-latitude system does not strongly influence the final position of Sandy, differences in the timing and location of its interactions with Sandy lead to considerable differences in rainfall forecasts, especially with respect to heavy precipitation over land," the researchers report in a recent issue of the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.By two days before landfall, the WRF-EnKF model was accurately predicting the hurricane's path with landfall in southern New Jersey, while the GFS model predicted a more northern landfall in New York and Connecticut, and the ECMWF model forecast landfall in northern New Jersey.Hurricane Sandy is a good storm to analyze because its path was unusual among Atlantic tropical storms, which do not usually turn northwest into the mid-Atlantic or New England. While all three models did a fairly good job at predicting aspects of this hurricane, the WRF-EnKF model was very promising in predicting path, intensity and rainfall.NOAA is currently evaluating the use of the WRF-EnKF system in storm prediction, and other researchers are using it to predict storm surge and risk analysis. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
February 24, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140224123753.htm | Computer model can help coastal managers with nourishment decisions | A computer model developed, in part, by University of Florida researchers can help coastal managers better understand the long-term effects of major storms, sea-level rise and beach restoration activities and possibly save millions of dollars. | Researchers used erosion data following tropical storms and hurricanes that hit Santa Rosa Island, off Florida’s Panhandle, and sea-level rise projections to predict beach habitat changes over the next 90 years. But they say their model can be used to inform nourishment decisions at any beach.Since the first project of its kind in the U.S. at Coney Island, N.Y., in 1922, coastal managers have used beach nourishment – essentially importing sand to replace sediment lost through storms or erosion – to restore damaged beaches, but it is laborious and expensive. Adding to coastal managers’ headaches, the offshore sand used for such ventures is running short.Florida has allotted $37 million in state money for beach nourishment projects this fiscal year, which ends June 30, and has appropriated almost $105 million over the past five years, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.“Moving large amounts of sand onto the beach is costly,” said Rafael Muñoz-Carpena, a UF professor of agricultural and biological engineering and study co-author. “Certainly preserving the beach has important benefits for humans and ecology, but as with any management decision, benefits need to be balanced by cost, especially when sooner or later the beach might be lost to sea-level rise or a major storm. How much is it worth for society to keep the beach longer in a given spot?”Decision-makers must answer those questions, and the answers won’t be cheap, Muñoz-Carpena said.UF researchers used their model to find out how long a beach would last under varying conditions, said Greg Kiker, an associate professor in agricultural and biological engineering and a study co-author.“Everyone knows that when you nourish a beach, it doesn’t last forever. It gets washed away,” Kiker said. With mean sea level rising, a storm that may not have done as much damage 20 to 40 years ago can do more damage today, he said. “As engineers, we said, ‘OK, what can we do about it?’”Using the model, coastal managers can assess tradeoffs ─ spending vs. benefits ─ of beach nourishment that will provide the most benefit for vulnerable species, adjacent residential areas and military installations, Muñoz-Carpena said.The study by members of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences came after the U.S. Department of Defense asked for research to assess the future vulnerability of endangered and protected shorebirds on Panhandle military installations to rising sea levels and major storm surges.UF researchers used erosion data and post-storm nourishment strategies after hurricanes Ivan and Dennis and Tropical Storm Katrina struck the island, which is part of Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach. The beach suffered severe erosion after each storm.They also used National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data from 69 major storms over the past 154 years, within about 65 miles of Santa Rosa Island, to construct storm-striking scenarios.Muñoz-Carpena and his colleagues said they’re not urging coastal managers to pump sand, which generally comes from offshore, onto beaches at any particular frequency. He cautions that the data may be limited by the uncertainty of future tropical storms and sea level projections.The paper is in this month’s issue of the journal | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
February 18, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140218100707.htm | Increase in Arctic cyclones is linked to climate change | Winter in the Arctic is not only cold and dark; it is also storm season when hurricane-like cyclones traverse the northern waters from Iceland to Alaska. These cyclones are characterized by strong localized drops in sea level pressure, and as Arctic-wide decreases in sea level pressure are one of the expected results of climate change, this could increase extreme Arctic cyclone activity, including powerful storms in the spring and fall. | A new study in "This research shows that the Arctic appears to be expressing symptoms expected from ongoing climate change," said Dr. Stephen Vavrus from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The long-term decline in atmospheric pressure over most of the Arctic is consistent with the response typically simulated by climate models to greenhouse warming, and this study finds a general corresponding increase in the frequency of extreme Arctic cyclones since the middle 19th century."Tracking changes in Arctic cyclone activity through time, Vavrus calculated a statistically significant, though minor, increase in extreme Arctic cyclone frequency over the study period, with increases strongest near the Aleutian Islands and Iceland. Dr. Vavrus suggests that, as of yet, the effect of climate change on Arctic cyclone activity has been minimal, but that future changes in polar climate will drive stronger shifts."One societally relevant implication is that more storminess probably means more erosion of Arctic coastlines, especially in tandem with declines in buffering sea ice cover and increases in thawing coastal permafrost," concluded Dr. Vavrus. "Erosion of Arctic coastlines has already been growing more severe during recent decades, and this study points to a contributing factor that will likely become an even more recognizable culprit in the future." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
February 17, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140217122400.htm | Outsmarting nature during disasters: Instead of winging it, planners need to think carefully about costs and benefits | The dramatic images of natural disasters in recent years, including hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Tohoku, Japan, earthquake and tsunami, show that nature, not the people preparing for hazards, often wins the high-stakes game of chance. | "We're playing a high-stakes game against nature without thinking about what we're doing," geophysicist Seth Stein of Northwestern University said. "We're mostly winging it instead of carefully thinking through the costs and benefits of different strategies. Sometimes we overprepare, and sometimes we underprepare."Stein will discuss his research in a presentation titled "How Much Natural Hazard Mitigation is Enough?" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago. His presentation is part of the symposium "Hazards: What Do We Build For?" to be held Feb. 17.Stein is the William Deering Professor of Geological Sciences in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of a new book, "Playing Against Nature: Integrating Science and Economics to Mitigate Natural Hazards in an Uncertain World" (Wiley, 2014) and the book "Disaster Deferred: A New View of Earthquake Hazards in the New Madrid Seismic Zone" (Columbia University Press, 2010).Sometimes nature surprises us when an earthquake, hurricane or flood is bigger or has greater effects than expected. In other cases, nature outsmarts us, doing great damage despite expensive mitigation measures or causing us to divert limited resources to mitigate hazards that are overestimated."To do better we need to get smarter," Stein said. "This means thoughtfully tackling the tough questions about how much natural hazard mitigation is enough. Choices have to be made in a very uncertain world."Stein's talk will use general principles and case studies to explore how communities can do better by taking an integrated view of natural hazards issues, rather than treating the relevant geoscience, engineering, economics and policy formulation separately.Some of the tough questions include:The choice is difficult because although science has learned a lot about natural hazards, Stein says, our ability to predict the future is much more limited than often assumed. Much of the problem comes from the fact that formulating effective natural hazard policy involves combining science, economics and risk analysis to analyze a problem and explore costs and benefits of different options in situations where the future is very uncertain.Because mitigation policies are typically chosen without such analysis -- often by a government mandate that does not consider the costs to the affected communities -- the results are often disappointing. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
January 31, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140131130753.htm | Trees' diminished resistance to tropical cyclone winds attributed to insect invasions | Guam experiences more tropical cyclones than any other state or territory in the United States. These cyclones--called typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean--can be devastating to Guam's dense native forests. The impact of large-scale tropical cyclones affects the health of managed and unmanaged forests, urban landscapes, and perennial horticulture plantings for many years after the actual storm. In fact, the island's forests are often called 'typhoon forests' because their health and appearance is inextricably defined by the most recent typhoons. | As recently as 2002, Thomas Marler from the College of Natural and Applied Sciences at the University of Guam, and John Lawrence from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service reported on a large-scale study of Marler and Lawrence discovered that although Typhoon Paka compromised the ability of the "A span of less than one decade allowed two alien invasions to eliminate the incipient resilience of a native tree species to tropical cyclone damage," the authors wrote. "This study underscores the fact that many years of observations after tropical cyclones are required to accurately determine [trees'] resilience."The complete study and abstract are available on the ASHS | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
January 28, 2014 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140128103121.htm | Hurricane Sandy may be a blessing for tiny piping plover | Few can forget the destruction left behind by Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled the shorelines of the Eastern United States. For the tiny piping plover, however, the storm may have been a blessing in disguise. | The threatened shorebird, which migrates in spring to nest on sandy beaches along the Atlantic coast, is expected to capitalize on new habitat created by the storm on hard-hit Long Island, N.Y."Hurricane Sandy pushed sand over the vegetation of the barrier islands, leaving behind wider sandy beaches, which is the plover's preferred habitat," said Jim Fraser, a professor of wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech, who has studied piping plovers and other shorebirds for almost three decades.The bird was federally listed as threatened and endangered in 1986.Hurricane Sandy in 2012 created three inlets on Long Island's south shore, two of which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quickly filled. Fraser says he hopes the third inlet, in a designated wilderness area of Fire Island National Seashore, will remain open, as it is New York's only natural inlet.Long since the storm has passed, the inlet continues to shape the barrier islands, further improving plover habitat. The birds like to feed on insects and invertebrates that reside in intertidal flats -- shallow, watery areas on the bay side of barrier islands.Leaving the inlet open would not only be good for the piping plover, it would also be a smart move for taxpayers, according to Fraser. "Post-storm public works projects are incredibly expensive. Ultimately, the taxpayer ends up footing the bill."On precarious barrier islands, houses and other buildings are vulnerable to destruction. The sands shift constantly under normal conditions; superstorms like Sandy rearrange them dramatically."We live too close to the sea," Fraser continued. "The human, structural, and environmental costs are very high, and they are increasing with each storm as coastal development shows no signs of abating."While storm damage affects humans negatively, it can have the opposite effect on wildlife. "Storm-created habitat is good for piping plovers and other birds," explained Fraser. Other positive environment impacts have also been observed. "Local people say the fishing is better, clams are growing faster, and the water is cleaner."Fraser's work studying piping plovers in other environments, including a 12-year observation in nearby West Hampton Dunes, N.Y., confirms that plover populations increase when new habitat is created on barrier islands after massive storms.He expects to see plover populations on Long Island surge when the birds return this spring. His ongoing research is monitoring the outcome. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,014 |
December 16, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216094656.htm | Green innovator: Turning chicken feathers and plant fiber into eco-leather, bio-based circuit boards | The Environmental Protection Agency has honored the University of Delaware's Richard Wool with its Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his extensive work developing bio-based materials to support the green energy infrastructure. | Wool was recognized We during a presentation at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 11.Now in its 18th year, the EPA awards program recognizes the design of safer and more sustainable chemicals, processes and products. Awards are conferred annually in five categories: Academic, Small Business, Greener Synthetic Pathways, Greener Reaction Conditions and Designing Greener Chemicals.Wool, UD professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the Affordable Composites from Renewable Resources (ACRES) program, is a world leader in developing safer chemical substances from renewable resources through processes that require less water and energy, and produce less hazardous waste compared to petroleum-based processes.The products can be used as adhesives, composites and foams -- even circuit boards, hurricane resistant energy efficient roofs and leather substitutes."Finding low toxicity replacements for commodity plastics such as polystyrene and PVC, adhesives, foams and composite resins, in addition to leather-like materials, must be a priority if we are to benefit the environment and human health," said Wool.Wool became passionate about sustainability in the early 1990s when he served as chairman of the American Society for Testing and Materials committee for biodegradable plastics. The committee included representatives from the farming community, state governments and major corporations, as well as environmentalists and members of the academic community."I became critically aware of the issues surrounding waste management, recycling, climate change and the protection of our natural resources," he said. "I began to wonder if there was a better way."This motivated Wool to incorporate green chemistry and green engineering solutions into his research. He created several high-performance materials using biobased feedstocks, including vegetable oils, lignin, chicken feathers and flax. He developed hurricane resistant roofing with colleagues in UD's civil and environmental engineering department in response to issues in global warming. He has also signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the South African government to further its development of biobased township housing using ACRES inventions.In 2012, Dixie Chemical began producing Wool's bio-based composite resins for a worldwide market. His discoveries have led to the development of soy-based composites used in boats, tractor panels and wind turbine parts.One of Wool's more recent inventions is a breathable, bio-based eco-leather that avoids the traditional leather tanning process. This environmentally-friendly product, developed as a collaboration between researchers in Wool's ACRES group and colleagues in UD's fashion and apparel studies department, has resulted in collaborations with well-known companies such as Nike, Puma and others to use the leather substitute in their products. He shares a patent with Nike on the development of its new environmentally friendly air bubbles for athletic shoe wear."Ten years ago, green chemistry and engineering was a novel concept, but today, we are reaching a critical mass of individuals focused on sustainability and the environment," said Wool. "This award lends credibility to what we are doing, and my hope is that it will cause some to give us a second look."Current and former students and colleagues in the ACRES group who contributed to Wool's green research will also be recognized during the ceremony. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
December 11, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211134200.htm | Arctic cyclones more common than previously thought | From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes -- and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. | That's about 40 percent more than previously thought, according to a new analysis of these Arctic storms.A 40 percent difference in the number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees latitude -- the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.The finding is also important to researchers who want to get a clear picture of current weather patterns, and a better understanding of potential climate change in the future, explained David Bromwich, professor of geography at The Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.The study was presented on Dec. 12 at the American Geophysical Union meeting, in a poster co-authored by his colleagues Natalia Tilinina and Sergey Gulev of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University."We now know there were more cyclones than previously thought, simply because we've gotten better at detecting them," Bromwich said.Cyclones are zones of low atmospheric pressure that have wind circulating around them. They can form over land or water, and go by different names depending on their size and where they are located. In Columbus, Ohio, for instance, a low-pressure system in December would simply be called a winter storm. Extreme low-pressure systems formed in the tropical waters can be called hurricanes or typhoons.How could anyone miss a storm as big as a cyclone? You might think they are easy to detect, but as it turns out, many of the cyclones that were missed were small in size and short in duration, or occurred in unpopulated areas. Yet researchers need to know about all the storms that have occurred if they are to get a complete picture of storm trends in the region."We can't yet tell if the number of cyclones is increasing or decreasing, because that would take a multidecade view. We do know that, since 2000, there have been a lot of rapid changes in the Arctic -- Greenland ice melting, tundra thawing -- so we can say that we're capturing a good view of what's happening in the Arctic during the current time of rapid changes," Bromwich said.Bromwich leads the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) collaboration, which uses statistics and computer algorithms to combine and re-examine diverse sources of historical weather information, such as satellite imagery, weather balloons, buoys and weather stations on the ground."There is actually so much information, it's hard to know what to do with it all. Each piece of data tells a different part of the story -- temperature, air pressure, wind, precipitation -- and we try to take all of these data and blend them together in a coherent way," Bromwich said.The actual computations happen at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and the combined ASR data are made publicly available to scientists.Two such scientists are cyclone experts Tilinina and Gulev, who worked with Bromwich to look for evidence of telltale changes in wind direction and air pressure in the ASR data. They compared the results to three other data re-analysis groups, all of which combine global weather data."We found that ASR provides new vision of the cyclone activity in high latitudes, showing that the Arctic is much more densely populated with cyclones than was suggested by the global re-analyses," Tilinina said.One global data set used for comparison was ERA-Interim, which is generated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Focusing on ERA-Interim data for latitudes north of 55 degrees, Tilinina and Gulev identified more than 1,200 cyclones per year between 2000 and 2010. For the same time period, ASR data yielded more than 1,900 cyclones per year.When they narrowed their search to cyclones that occurred directly over the Arctic Ocean, they found more than 200 per year in ERA-Interim, and a little over 300 per year in ASR.There was good agreement between all the data sets when it came to big cyclones, the researchers found, but the Arctic-centered ASR appeared to catch smaller, shorter-lived cyclones that escaped detection in the larger, global data sets. The ASR data also provided more detail on the biggest cyclones, capturing the very beginning of the storms earlier and tracking their decay longer.Extreme Arctic cyclones are of special concern to climate scientists because they melt sea ice, Bromwich said."When a cyclone goes over water, it mixes the water up. In the tropical latitudes, surface water is warm, and hurricanes churn cold water from the deep up to the surface. In the Arctic, it's the exact opposite: there's warmer water below, and the cyclone churns that warm water up to the surface, so the ice melts."As an example, he cited the especially large cyclone that hit the Arctic in August 2012, which scientists believe played a significant role in the record retreat of sea ice that year. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
December 11, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211070506.htm | Post-Sandy, Long Island barrier systems appear surprisingly sound | As coastal communities continue to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, scientists at this week's annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union offer some encouraging news: the storm did not seriously damage the offshore barrier system that controls erosion on Long Island. Long-term concerns remain about the effects on the region of sea-level rise, pollutants churned up by the storm within back-barrier estuaries, and the damage closer to shore, but in the near-term, Long Island residents can rebuild knowing that Hurricane Sandy did not significantly alter the offshore barrier systems that control coastal erosion on the island. | The findings are based on pre-storm survey data compared to post-storm data acquired through a collaborative rapid response science mission to the south shore of Long Island led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, Adelphi University, Stony Brook University and other institutions in the New York metro area. The purpose of the mission, conducted last January, was to assess the post-Sandy health of the offshore barrier system that protects the New York Harbor and southwestern Long Island region against damage from future storms.The team conducted marine geophysical surveys of the seafloor and shallow subsurface to map the sedimentary impact of the hurricane on the beach/barrier systems of selected bay, inlet and nearshore areas of portions of the south shore of Long Island.Using a CHIRP (compressed high-intensity radar pulse) sonar system and an even higher frequency seafloor mapping system supplied by Stony Brook University, the scientists used two research vessels to profile the seafloor and upper sediment layers of the ocean bottom. They surveyed three representative segments of the shoreface that protects Long Island, each segment about 15 meters deep, one mile offshore and roughly six square miles in size.The storm, they found, did not significantly erode these sampled segments of shoreface."The shape of the bedforms that make up the barrier system did not change a whole lot," said co-Principal Investigator (PI) John Goff of the Institute for Geophysics. "Where we might have expected to see significant erosion based on long-term history, not a lot happened -- nothing that ate into the shoreface.""The sand largely took the blow," added co-PI Jamie Austin of the Institute for Geophysics. "Like a good barricade, the barrier system absorbed the significant blow, but held."This was not the case in other storm-ravaged zones the Texas team has surveyed. When Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2008, the storm significantly disrupted the thin finer-grained sediment layer offshore, removing material underneath the shoreline in a way that exacerbated long-term problems of erosion.Compared to Galveston, Long Island has a greater abundance of sand in its overall system. The storm churned up much of this sand and moved bedforms, but the scientists speculate that the greater abundance of sand helped the offshore barriers maintain their overall shape and integrity as erosional barriers.Tempering this good news, the survey team also found evidence the storm brought new pollutants into the waters off Long Island. Heavy metals were detected in a layer of mud that the storm deposited offshore. Beth Christensen of Adelphi University traced the metals back to muds from the South Shore Estuary Reserve, which has a long history of pollution from industry and human habitation.By this summer, natural forces had dispersed the layer of mud offshore, and the concentrations of toxins were not high enough to be an immediate concern, said Christensen."But if we continue to see more events like Sandy, we'll see the introduction of more and more muds from the estuary," said Christensen, "adding additional toxins to an already stressed system."Continued sea-level rise will also create more pressure on the barrier system, heightening problems onshore. With higher sea level, all of the onshore impacts of a storm like Sandy will go up, notes Goff."In the long-term, if sea level gets high enough, the barrier system has no choice but to retreat and move landwards," said Goff, exposing the shoreline to increased erosion. "But at least for the present, there's no evidence of that being imminent."The mission was the sixth rapid response science mission funded by the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. (The Institute for Geophysics is a research unit within the Jackson School.) The missions place geoscientists on the scenes of natural disasters as quickly as possible to measure the often vanishing traces of hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters."The faster we get out into the field to measure Earth's response to naturally destructive events, the better we can relate data to the disasters," said Austin.Video: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
December 4, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131204132020.htm | Sea-level rise to drive coastal flooding, regardless of change in cyclone activity | Despite the fact that recent studies have focused on climate change impacts on the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones themselves, a research team led by Jon Woodruff of the University of Massachusetts Amherst found on review of the relevant science that sea level rise and shoreline retreat are the two more certain factors expected to drive an increase in future flood risk from such storms. | Writing in the current special issue of Sea level rise and its potential to dramatically change the coastal landscape through shoreline erosion and barrier island degradation, for example, is an under-appreciated and understudied factor that could lead to catastrophic changes in flood risk associated with tropical cyclones, known as hurricanes in the North Atlantic, they say.Woodruff adds, "There is general agreement that while globally, tropical cyclones will decline in frequency, their strength will be more intense. However, there is less consensus on the magnitude of these changes, and it remains unclear how closely individual regions of tropical cyclone activity will follow global trends."Despite these uncertainties, the UMass Amherst geoscientist notes, the intensity and frequency of flooding by tropical cyclones will increase significantly due to accelerated sea level rise. Further, the geologic record provides clear examples for the importance of accelerated sea level rise in initiating significant changes in shoreline behavior."The era of relatively moderate sea level rise that most coastlines have experienced during the past few millennia is over, and shorelines are now beginning to adjust to a new boundary condition that in most cases serves to accelerate rates of shoreline retreat," he says.The authors focus on three physical factors they say should be considered together to understand future coastal flooding from hurricanes: Tropical cyclone climatology, relative sea level rise and shoreline change. "Modes of climate variability explain 30 to 45 percent of the variance of tropical cyclone activity within the instrumental historical record. This percentage is far less, however, when considering only storms that make landfall," they point out.By contrast, "a future rise in sea level is far more certain, particularly along the coastlines most prone to tropical cyclone disruption. For example, a rise in sea level of 1 meter for the New York City region would result in the present-day 100-year flood events occurring every 3 to 20 years. Most engineered coastlines are not designed for this increase in extreme flood frequency, and the dominance of sea-level rise and landscape dynamics on impacts by landfalling tropical cyclones must be acknowledged for effective planning and management of our future coastlines," Woodruff and colleagues write.They add that "population centers most at risk of tropical cyclone impacts are mainly located along dynamic and subsiding sedimentary coasts that will serve to further enhance the impact of future tropical cyclone floods." People can soften such impacts "partly with adaptive strategies, which include careful stewardship of sediments," and by reducing human-caused land subsidence along many of the world's most populated coastlines due to the extraction of groundwater, oil and gas.Woodruff and colleagues present prehistoric, instrumental and modeling evidence supporting the dominance of sea level rise on extreme flooding associated with tropical cyclones and the compounding influences of resulting shoreline change on the flood intensity by these events. They say that paleoreconstructions from barrier beach systems and accompanying marshes indicate that "many if these coastal environments have remained remarkably stable over the last few millennia, despite episodic and extreme disruption by tropical cyclones."In stark contrast, these landforms were either non-existent or quickly washed over by storms, during pre-historic times of rapid sea level rise similar to those projected for the end of this century, in 2100. The authors point out, "It is therefore prudent to expect a decrease in the resilience of these low-lying coastlines from tropical cyclone impacts when enhanced by elevated rates of sea level rise."Finally, they discuss management strategies in the context of "an almost certain increase in tropical cyclone flood frequency," as well as the need for accurate assessments of the disturbance and resilience of coastal systems to episodic flooding by tropical cyclones under increased rates of sea level rise. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
November 27, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131127170232.htm | Paleotempestology and 2011's Hurricane Irene | A new study published in the December issue of GSA Today examines the geological legacy of Hurricane Irene, not only in terms of its impact on current coastal conditions but also in what it can tell geoscientists about the past. Hurricane Irene made landfall in Onslow Bay, North Carolina, USA, on 27 August 2011, at which time it had been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane after hitting the Bahamas at Category 3 strength. | In their Those who study the paleo-storm record explain that gaining understanding of past events provides the context for future coastal vulnerability. Hippensteel and colleagues apply evidence of what they call the "lack of a definitive signature" from Hurricane Irene to a 1500-year paleostorm record at Onslow Bay. They write that fewer hurricanes could be found in the fossil and sedimentary records (through bioturbation or foraminiferal dissolution) than had actually made landfall there.The authors infer that the lack of storm records in the marsh sediments from Onslow Bay means that only hurricane strikes of higher magnitude can provide proxies for understanding the paleostorm record, because only the most robust storm deposits are archived. The lack of definitive signs of Hurricane Irene in the area raises their concerns about the current understanding of hurricane deposition and preservation. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
November 11, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131111161430.htm | Of hurricanes, fungus and Parkinson's disease | Scientists at Rutgers and Emory universities have discovered that a compound often emitted by mold may be linked to symptoms of Parkinson's disease. | Arati Inamdar and Joan Bennett, researchers in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers, used fruit flies to establish the connection between the compound -- popularly known as mushroom alcohol -- and the malfunction of two genes involved in the packaging and transport of dopamine, the chemical released by nerve cells to send messages to other nerve cells in the brain.The findings were published online today in the "Parkinson's has been linked to exposure to environmental toxins, but the toxins were human-made chemicals," Inamdar said. "In this paper, we show that biologic compounds have the potential to damage dopamine and cause Parkinson's symptoms."For co-author Bennett, the research was more than academic. Bennett was working at Tulane University in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Her flooded house became infested with molds, which she collected in samples, wearing a mask, gloves and protective gear."I felt horrible -- headaches, dizziness, nausea," said Bennett, now a professor of plant pathology and biology at Rutgers. "I knew something about 'sick building syndrome' but until then I didn't believe in it. I didn't think it would be possible to breathe in enough mold spores to get sick." That is when she formed her hypothesis that volatiles might be involved.Inamdar, who uses fruit flies in her research, and Bennett began their study shortly after Bennett arrived at Rutgers. Bennett wanted to understand the connection between molds and symptoms like those she had experienced following Katrina.The scientists discovered that the volatile organic compound 1-octen-3-ol, otherwise known as mushroom alcohol, can cause movement disorders in flies, similar to those observed in the presence of pesticides, such as paraquat and rotenone. Further, they discovered that it attacked two genes that deal with dopamine, degenerating the neurons and causing the Parkinson's-like symptoms.Studies indicate that Parkinson's disease -- a progressive disease of the nervous system marked by tremor, muscular rigidity and slow, imprecise movement -- is increasing in rural areas, where it's usually attributed to pesticide exposure. But rural environments also have a lot of mold and mushroom exposure."Our work suggests that 1-octen-3-ol might also be connected to the disease, particularly for people with a genetic susceptibility to it," Inamdar said. "We've given the epidemiologists some new avenues to explore." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
November 8, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131108091814.htm | Super-Typhoon Haiyan lashes the Philippines | Super-Typhoon Haiyan was lashing the central and southern Philippines on Nov. 7 bringing maximum sustained winds of a Category 5 hurricane. NASA is providing visible, infrared and microwave satellite data to forecasters and warnings are in effect for the Philippines and Micronesia as Haiyan moves west. | Brian McNoldy, a Senior Research Associate at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami, Fla. noted that on the morning (EST) of Nov. 7, "Haiyan has achieved tropical cyclone perfection. It is now estimated at 165kts (190mph), with an 8.0 on the Dvorak scale... the highest possible value."Warnings in the Philippines have been raise throughout much of the country. In Luzon:Signal #1 is in effect for : Camarines Norte & Sur, Catanduanes, Mindoro Provinces, Marinduque, Northern Palawan, Calamian Group of Islands, and Southern Quezon.Signal #2 is in effect for: Romblon, Sorsogon, Albay, Ticao and Burias island.In Visayas, Signal #1 is in effect for Squijor, and Signal #2 is in effect for: Bohol, Negros Occidental and Oriental, Aklan, Capiz, Antique, rest of Cebu, Iloilo and Guimara. Signal #3 is in effect for: Northern Samar, Masbate, northern Cebu, Cebu City and Bantayan island, and Signal #4 is in effect for: Eastern Samar, Samar, Leyte, Southern Leyte and Biliran island.In Mindanao, Signal #1 was posted for: Misamis Oriental, Agusan del Sur; Signal #2 for: Camiguin, Surigao del Norte & Sur and Agusan del Norte and Signal #3 is in effect for: Siargao Island and Dinagat province.In Micronesia, a Typhoon Warning is in effect for Kayangel and Koror in the Republic of Palau and Ngulu in Yap State.Early on Nov. 7, NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Haiyan as it was approaching the Philippines. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard captured a visible image on Nov. 7, 2013 at 04:25 UTC/Nov. 6 at 11:25 p.m. EDT that showed the thick bands of powerful thunderstorms that surrounded the eye. The MODIS image also revealed a powerful, wide band of thunderstorms in the western quadrant that was affecting the Philippines in the early morning hours (Eastern Daylight Time/U.S.) on Nov. 7.At the same time, another instrument aboard Aqua captured infrared data on the storm using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument, providing cloud top temperatures and sea surface temperatures. The infrared data revealed a sharply defined eye with multiple concentric rings of thunderstorms and a deep convective eyewall. The infrared data showed cloud top temperatures as cold as 210 degrees kelvin/-81.67F/-63.15C/ in the thick band of thunderstorms around the center. Those cold temperatures indicate very high, powerful thunderstorms with very heavy rain potential.On Nov. 7 at 1500 UTC/10 a.m. EDT, Super-Typhoon Haiyan's maximum sustained winds were near 165 knots/189.9 mph/305.6 kph. Haiyan is a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center estimated that gusts are as strong as 200 knots/ 230.2 mph/370.4 kph.The U.S. National Hurricane Center website indicates that a Category 5 hurricane/typhoon would cause catastrophic damage: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.Haiyan was located near 10.4 north latitude and 128.1 east longitude, about 543 nautical miles east-southeast of Manila, Philippines. It is moving west-northwest at 22 knots/25.3 mph/40.7 kph and generating extremely rough seas with wave heights to 50 feet/15.2 meters.The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that extremely favorable environmental conditions such as the warm waters ahead of the system will help to maintain its strength at super typhoon intensity through landfall in the central Philippines and up to 1500 UTC/10 a.m. EDT on Nov. 8. According to forecast track, Manila is now expected to be impacted by the northeastern quadrant, the strongest side of the storm.After passing through the Philippines, Haiyan is expected to move through the South China Sea as it heads for landfall in Vietnam. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
November 5, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105093133.htm | Hurricane Sandy's impact measured by millions of Flickr pictures | A new study has discovered a striking connection between the number of pictures of Hurricane Sandy posted on Flickr and the atmospheric pressure in New Jersey as the hurricane crashed through the US state in 2012. | Hurricane Sandy was the second-costliest hurricane to hit the US, hitting 24 states in late October last year, with New Jersey one of the worst affected.In 2012 32 million photos were posted on image hosting website Flickr and by counting the number of pictures tagged either 'Hurricane Sandy', 'hurricane' or 'sandy' between October 20 and November 20 2012, a team of researchers led by two Warwick Business School academics, Tobias Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance, and Suzy Moat, Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science, found a strong link to atmospheric pressure dropping in New Jersey.In fact, the highest number of pictures posted were taken in the same hour in which Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey.In Preis and Moat's work has previously uncovered a range of intriguing links between what people look for online and their behaviour in the real world. Recent results revealed that changes in how frequently people searched for financial information on Google and Wikipedia could be interpreted as early signs of stock market moves, and that internet users in countries with a higher per capita GDP search for more information about the future."Our steadily increasing use of digital technology is opening up new and fruitful ways to document and follow human actions," said Dr Preis. "Building on our recent work, we asked whether data from photos uploaded to Flickr could have been used to measure the impact of Hurricane Sandy."Our new results show that the greatest number of photos taken with Flickr titles, descriptions or tags including the words 'hurricane', 'sandy' or 'Hurricane Sandy' were taken in exactly the hour which Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey."Examination of the number of Hurricane Sandy related photos taken before and after landfall reveals a striking correlation with environmental measurements of the development of the hurricane."Dr Moat added: "As the severity of a hurricane in a given area increases, atmospheric pressure drops. We found that as atmospheric pressure in New Jersey fell to its worst lows, the number of photos taken rose, and as atmospheric pressure in New Jersey climbed again, the number of photos taken fell."Plotting the data revealed that the number of photos taken increased continuously while 'Sandy' was moving towards the coast of the US. This study would suggest that in cases where no external sensors are available, it may be possible to use the number of Flickr photos relating to a topic to gauge the current level of this category of problems."Flickr can be considered as a system of large scale real-time sensors, documenting collective human attention. Increases in Flickr photo counts with particular labels may reveal notable increases in attention to a particular issue, which in some cases may merit further investigation for policy makers."Appropriate leverage of such online indicators of large disasters could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management: in particular if no secondary environmental measures are available." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
October 27, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131027123555.htm | Hurricane Sandy's lessons include: Put parks, not houses, on the beach | ust days before Hurricane Sandy hit the New York and New Jersey coastline on 29 October 2012, scientists from the City University of New York's (CUNY) College of Staten Island had produced the most detailed model to date of the region's potential for damage from big storms. So naturally, the morning after the floods receded from Staten Island, CUNY geology professor Alan I. Benimoff was out mapping the high-water marks in the flooded neighborhoods. There he discovered that his team's pre-Sandy model had been right on the money. | Sandy caused 40 deaths and massive damage in New York City -- yet future storms could be worse, according to Benimoff and his colleagues. At the 2013 Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting in Denver, they will describe how the combination of rising sea level and more frequent, more severe hurricanes could bring Atlantic water much higher.Their new flood model predicts that Staten Island and Long Island would again flood in low-lying areas, such as South Beach, with their working-class neighborhoods and beachfront boardwalks, and could even surpass Sandy levels. In Manhattan, the storm surge could extend past the low areas that flooded in Sandy, which included Battery Park subway tunnels, the Financial District, and a 14th Street electrical substation.The researchers are geology professors Benimoff and William J. Fritz; Michael Kress, director of the CUNY Interdisciplinary High Performance Computer Center, vice president for technology systems, and professor of computer science; and undergraduate student Liridon Sela.Since Sandy, Benimoff and Fritz, who is interim president of College of Staten Island, have been active in the community discussions about how -- or whether -- to rebuild on the most vulnerable parts of the barrier islands. They have developed five recommendations for area policy makers, emergency agencies and residents.In public discussions, Benimoff does not mince words. As a scientist, he says, he has an obligation to communicate data clearly to non-scientists."To paraphrase our governor: There are some parcels of land that Mother Nature owns, and when she comes to visit, she visits," Benimoff says. "The reality is that these particular barrier islands are uniquely vulnerable to storm surges. They have a lot of coastal and wetland that never should have been built on."What's more, they have a geometry of coastline where Coney Island and Sandy Hook make a right angle with Staten Island right at the apex, and the seafloor comes up very gradually. Water piles up in that corner and has nowhere to go but inland. That means any storm that comes perpendicular to the coastline of New Jersey is going to put us in harm's way."The College of Staten Island scientists' five-point plan recommends: 1. Protect the existing natural barriers -- the beaches and dunes; 2. Build them higher; 3. Rezone in the flood zone to prevent home construction. Buy these properties and turn them into parks, which will sponge up the inevitable floodwaters and partially protect the islands' higher lands. (There is precedent for this -- after 157 people died in 1946 and 1960 tsunamis in Hilo, Hawaii, the most damaged neighborhoods were turned into parks.) 4. Be very careful about engineering solutions such as sea barriers because they will not only be expensive but also protect one stretch of beach at the expense of its neighbor. "Jetties, sandbars, seawalls -- these are merely Band-Aids," Benimoff says. "You've got to face the music here." 5. Teach coastal residents how to survive a hurricane: Stay informed by watching weather forecasts. Evacuate early. Don't seek refuge in basements, which could flood. Know your area's high ground and, if faced with rapidly rising waters, go there. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
October 17, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131017173902.htm | Could Hurricane Sandy happen again? Maybe, says geologist | Almost a year after Hurricane Sandy, parts of New York and New Jersey are still recovering from billions of dollars in flood damage. Tufts University geologist Andrew Kemp sees the possibility of damage from storms smaller than Sandy in the future. | "Rising sea levels exacerbate flooding," says Kemp. "As sea level rises, smaller and weaker storms will cause flood damage." An assistant professor in Tufts' Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Kemp co-authored a study on sea-level change close to New York that was published recently in the Sandy hit New York as a team led by Kemp was researching sea-level change and flooding that had occurred in seven historically damaging hurricanes in New York since 1788. Last October, Sandy's storm surge hit the coast at high tide, but storm and tidal conditions were not the only cause of the devastation, Kemp says. Seawaters off New York's coast have risen 16 inches since 1778, the year of New York City's first major recorded storm, his research shows.To make this determination Kemp and his team studied salt-marsh sediments from Barnegat Bay in northern New Jersey, south of the tide gauge at Battery Park in New York. Using sediment cores, long cylinders drilled into the marsh floor that offer scientists a look back through time, they were able to reconstruct sea-level changes since 1788.Kemp cites two factors for rising seas. One is the natural sinking of land called glacio-isostatic adjustment. A second factor, and one supported by the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), points to the melting of the ice-covered terrain of Greenland and Antarctic as well as the thermal expansion of ocean waters.Looking forward, Kemp sees the possibility of storms less powerful than Sandy inflicting serious damage. He uses a basketball analogy. "It's like playing basketball and raising the level of the court so that shorter and shorter people can dunk. It makes low lying property and infrastructure more vulnerable at a time when developers are pumping money into coastal cities and towns." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
October 7, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131007122408.htm | Hurricane Sandy's impact on New Jersey coastal wetlands, one year later | Hurricane Sandy landed right on top of Dr. Tracy Quirk's wetland monitoring stations -- but it wasn't all bad news. | Quirk, an assistant professor in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science at Drexel University, had been performing wetland research for several years at monitoring sites in Barnegat and Delaware Bays in New Jersey. Recording devices installed at these sites continuously measured water level and salinity for a wide range of wetland studies at Drexel and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.As Sandy hit and water levels rose, those measurements continued."We have continuous data on how long these areas were flooded and how high the water rose at these sites," said Quirk.It was a stroke of good luck to have captured detailed measurements during a storm of this rare magnitude. Quirk recognized that the data could provide new answers to the questions she had been investigating about how wetland ecosystems sustain themselves and function. Now she could also learn how marshes responded to the severe disturbance effect of the storm."The prospect of future storms of this magnitude suggests that we will need to understand their effects on ecosystem dynamics as part of the 'new normal,'" Quirk said.In February she began working on an intensive year-long project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to evaluate ecosystem processes in New Jersey's salt marshes before, during, and for a year following Hurricane Sandy. Quirk is beginning to analyze findings from the study now.There was some good news from the marshes: Although some water-level recorders were over-topped and stopped recording (making it difficult to use direct measures of the water height), there was evidence of marsh swelling during the storm. That swelling is an indication of marshes' ability to absorb some of the storm surge -- which, in hard-hit urban areas, had resulted in high water marks up to seven feet during Hurricane Sandy. Quirk points out that resilient, healthy wetlands near coastal areas have a key role in protecting local communities from hurricane-induced storm surges and flooding."Imagine having a marsh in front of your house instead of concrete," Quirk said. "Paved areas make flooding worse because water has nowhere to go."In her post-Sandy research, Quirk was interested in finding out whether the storm affected how the marshes sustain themselves. The disturbance of an intense storm could alter the delicate equilibrium between flooding, vegetation growth and sediment deposits in wetland ecosystems -- either temporarily or long-term.That's where the bad news comes in. As she works through the data analysis this fall, Quirk said she hasn't found much sign of sediment deposits, before or after the hurricane struck. Sandy had the potential to deposit a lot of sediments, fast, which would have been good for building up wetlands. Hurricane Irene in 2011 had been associated with a bump up in wetland accretion by several millimeters at a number of locations in the region -- a bonus growth equivalent to the amount that typically accrues in an entire year."Sediment-limited systems like coastal lagoon marshes largely depend on deposition by storms to vertically adjust elevation, so they don't sink relative to sea level," Quirk said. "In places where we have ongoing monitoring, the evidence suggests that some sites are subsiding -- sinking below the surface -- rather than increasing elevation at a rate similar to local sea level rise. Surface deposition would be a good thing for these marshes."Any number of reasons could explain why those hoped-for sediment deposits didn't materialize, she said. Maybe the unusually high tide during Hurricane Sandy caused less suspension of sediments in the storm-surge waters. Or maybe the storm water did carry sediments and plant debris, but dropped them on the barrier island or inland along the tree line and not at her sampling sites in the marsh interior.Whatever the reason, Quirk's findings point to cause for continued concern over the coastal marshes' future."These salt marshes provide a number of extremely valuable ecosystem services and benefits to society," she said. Storm surge protection is just one of these. Coastal marshes also provide excellent habitat for commercially and recreationally important fish and shellfish, especially as a nursery ground for these animals. They're also important for storing, transforming and removing nutrients that can be harmful to the aquatic ecosystems.The areas of tidal wetlands remaining in New Jersey have been sharply reduced in proportion to the past, with surrounding areas built up with bulkheads and other development -- making the remaining wetlands all the more crucial to protect because they cannot shift inland."With accelerating sea level rise, it is unknown how many of these marshes are going to be able to keep up because they are dependent on plant growth, which is a slow process," Quirk said."Since 2010, the northern area of Barnegat Bay and the marsh on the bayside of the barrier island at Island Beach State Park is converting before our eyes from marsh to open water." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
October 2, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131002112324.htm | How one transportation business survived Hurricane Sandy | In a year-long case study of a major American transportation company, researchers at The Ohio State University have uncovered the strategies that helped the company maintain safety and meet customer demand during 2012's Hurricane Sandy. | One key to the company's effective response was its setup of a weather event management team, an ad hoc group that set planning priorities as the storm approached the United States, ensuring the protection of personnel and equipment in hurricane's path.More surprisingly, as landfall was imminent, the company's schedulers were able to provide an especially fast response to changing conditions by bypassing normal communications channels that relied on technology. Instead, they spoke to each other face-to-face or directly on the phone to speed the exchange of information about time-critical issues.The researchers were already studying the company when Sandy occurred almost exactly a year ago. David Woods, professor of integrated systems engineering at Ohio State, and doctoral students David Deary and Katherine Walker spent time in its command centers and field operations throughout 2012. The company asked that its name be withheld from the study results."It was an opportunity for us to see resilience in action at an organizational scale," Woods said. "When this hurricane struck the northeast -- an area of the U.S. that's very sensitive to transportation disruptions -- it provided a salient example of how organizations need to be prepared for challenging events in our interconnected world."They reported the results of the study on Oct. 3, at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society meeting in San Diego.As technology continues to make the world more interconnected, businesses have to be more concerned with resilience, Woods said -- not just automakers, banks and utilities, but any company that relies on managing risk or digital assets or continuity of service for its customers. Financial, political and environmental threats emerge quickly, and aren't as easy to anticipate as a hurricane.Woods has long studied the issue of resilience, and is president of the Resilience Engineering Association -- an international professional organization "facilitating the development of techniques to outmaneuver the complexities of today's world."He explained that businesses can react to disruptions one of two ways -- they can go completely rigid and stop providing services, or remain flexible and continue to provide services whenever or as long as possible.The company under study uses flexibility to compete in its area of the transportation industry. So the company remained open and accommodated emerging customer requests until it had to stop to ensure personnel safety and protect its equipment.As meteorologists tracked Sandy's approach across the Atlantic, the company set up a weather event management team to connect experts and decision makers who had the authority to commit the company's resources or accept risk for meeting individual customer requests in the northeast. It scheduled a complete shutdown of services for the time when the hurricane would make landfall.Until then? "They were scrambling to do everything they wanted to get done," Deary said. As one senior employee in a command center told him, "The actual storm is not a crisis -- getting ready for the storm is a crisis." During this time, the company adopted strategies to speed communication and decision-making."It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to speed things up, they stepped back from electronic communication. When an issue was important, they actually walked around the command center and talked to each other directly," Deary observed.To save time, the schedulers in the command center were also given the authority to make critical decisions, such as those concerning asset movement and protection, without seeking prior approval of senior managers. This approach was successful because of the schedulers' keen awareness of management's priorities in responding to the event.Ultimately, the company suffered no human injuries or significant equipment damage. It met many, though not all, last-minute customer requests before Sandy arrived, and appeared to meet customer expectations for restoration of service after the storm passed, the researchers concluded."This study suggests that a business doesn't have to be perfect, but if it's flexible -- if it's clear to customers that you're trying to be flexible in accommodating them, you succeed in the long run, and stakeholders look at you in a positive way," he said.This study is just one of many where Ohio State students are learning to help organizations become more resilient. He also helps lead a university-wide Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social and Engineered Systems -- a 10-college collaboration which aims to develop certificate programs in complexity. Through collaborations with the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, the initiative is providing computer modeling tools that Ohio State students will use to study interconnected systems and guide new research. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
September 19, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130919085813.htm | After the storms, a different opinion on climate change | Extreme weather may lead people to think more seriously about climate change, according to new research. In the wake of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, New Jersey residents were more likely to show support for a politician running on a "green" platform, and expressed a greater belief that climate change is caused by human activity. | This research, published in Though scientists are in near-unilateral agreement that human activity contributes to climate change, the relationship isn't as clear to many politicians and citizens. This translates into lackluster support for environmental policies, especially when the short-term consequences amount to higher taxes."Americans tend to vote more from a self-interested perspective rather than demand that their government affect change," says lead researcher Laurie Rudman of Rutgers University.In 2010, Rudman and her colleagues Meghan McLean and Martin Bunzl surveyed over 250 Rutgers undergraduate students, measuring their attitudes toward two politicians, one who favored and another who opposed environmental policies that involve tax increases. The researchers asked the students whether they believed that humans are causing climate change, and they also had the students complete a test intended to reveal their automatic, instinctual preferences toward the politicians.Though most students said they preferred the green politician, their automatic preferences suggested otherwise. The automatic-attitudes test indicated that the students tended to prefer the politician who did not want to raise taxes to fund environment-friendly policy initiatives.After Hurricanes Irene and Sandy devastated many areas on the Eastern Seaboard in 2012, Rudman and colleagues wondered whether they would see any differences in students' attitudes toward environmental policies."It seemed likely that what was needed was a change of 'heart,'" Rudman explains. "Direct, emotional experiences are effective for that."In contrast with the first group, students tested in 2012 showed a clear preference for the green politician, even on the automatic attitudes test. And those students who were particularly affected by Hurricane Sandy -- experiencing power outages, school disruptions, even damaged or destroyed homes -- showed the strongest preference for the green politician."Not only was extreme weather persuasive at the automatic level, people were more likely to base their decisions on their gut-feelings in the aftermath of Sandy, compared to before the storm," Rudman explains.While they don't know whether the first group of students would have shown a shift in attitudes after the storms, the researchers believe their findings provide evidence that personal experience is one factor that can influence instinctive attitudes toward environmental policy. If storms do become more prevalent and violent as the climate changes, they argue, more people may demand substantive policy changes.Waiting for severe storms to shift the public's opinions on policy changes might be a sobering reality, but Rudman and her colleagues are more optimistic."Our hope is that researchers will design persuasion strategies that effectively change people's implicit attitudes without them having to suffer through a disaster," Rudman concludes. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
September 18, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130918180934.htm | African dust storms in our air: Dust storms in Africa affect U.S. and the Caribbean's air quality | You might find it hard to believe that dust clouds from the African Sahara can travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, but it does every year and in large quantities. In a recent study, Joseph Prospero, professor emeritus at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and collaborators at the University of Houston and Arizona State University found that the average air concentrations of inhalable particles more than doubled during a major Saharan dust intrusion in Houston, Texas. | The researchers were able to distinguish between particles transported across the Atlantic and those from local sources in the Houston region. In this way they established the "fingerprint" of the African dust. To their knowledge, this is the first study that isolates, differentiates, and quantifies the air contaminants in the US during the incursion of African dust. There is a concern that the fine airborne dust particles could be a health problem for asthmatics and people with respiratory problems."Current EPA air quality standards are based on the total amount of particles that are in the air," Prospero says. "Our study will contribute to our ability to discriminate and identify the dominant components in the air during long-range transport events," he says. "Our hope is that our work is instrumental in assisting regulatory agencies respond to health and environmental issues linked to African dust."The findings published in the journal of "African dust storms are associated with hurricane season because the meteorological situations that are involved with generating tropical cyclones are also associated with the generation and transport of dust," Prospero says. "The dust emerges from the coast of Africa in a hot, dry, elevated layer -- the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) following behind Easterly Waves from which tropical cyclones sometimes develop," he says. "The SAL interacts with the waves in complex way, so that the relationship is not entirely clear. It is the subject of much ongoing research."Also, the dust suspended in the wind absorbs and scatters solar radiation. Less sunlight reaches the ocean surface resulting in cooler temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, the main area where hurricanes develop. Cooler ocean temperatures mean less energy for hurricanes to form and strengthen."Dust activity has been very intense this year and sea surface temperatures are unusually low," Prospero says. "These may have been contributing factors to the unusually weak hurricane season this year."A better understanding of all the processes involved in Saharan air outbreaks would help create models that can predict future trends."The question is what happens with climate change," Prospero says. "Although much of North Africa is expected to get drier, which would mean more dust, models can't agree on whether the climate in the current major dust sources will get drier or wetter in the future" he says. "We are still trying to understand what drives these differences and the possible impacts."Prospero and his collaborator from the University of Puerto Rico make practical recommendations for the creation of a cooperative project that include long-term measurements of African dust occurrences in the Caribbean Basin, in a recent study published in the journal of American Meteorological Society. The scientists hope this collaborative effort will lead to a better understanding of the range and complexity of Saharan dust storms and the impact of African dust on climate and human health. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
September 15, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130915131228.htm | Concepts for Houston, Texas flood barrier | This month it will be exactly five years ago that Hurricane Ike caused enormous damage in and around Houston and Galveston in the US state of Texas. With more than $38 billion in damage and over 100 deaths, Ike ranks third in the list of the costliest hurricanes in US history. But it could have been a lot worse. With more than two million inhabitants, Houston is not only the fourth largest city in the United States, it is also the centre of the oil and gas industry. The Port of Houston fulfils a crucial economic role and generates around $178 million in revenues each year. Given the vulnerability of the area, it is a question of when rather than whether the city will again be hit by a major hurricane. | This makes good coastal defences essential. Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), Royal HaskoningDHV and Iv Infra are exploring possible designs for a flood barrier off the coast of Houston.Immediately after Hurricane Ike, Professor Bill Merrell of the Texas A&M University developed and unveiled the 'Ike Dike' concept. A key element of the concept is a movable flood barrier that can seal off the bay near Galveston and Houston during a hurricane. Under normal conditions the bay provides a passage to the Port of Houston, so it must remain accessible for shipping. Another matter of great importance is the preservation of the ecosystems in the bay. Which types of flood barriers are buildable to protect the Houston/Galveston area optimally against storm surges? This is the question that the Delft University of Technology, Royal HaskoningDHV and Iv-Infra are currently examining on behalf of principals in Texas.Over the past months the Delft University of Technology, Royal HaskoningDHV and Iv-Infra have worked out some flood defence concepts for closing off the approximately three kilometres long opening and have presented them to Bill Merrell and his team. In terms of their dimensions the barriers are similar to the Maeslant and Eastern Scheldt storm surge barriers in the Netherlands. The various concepts were compared with each other in respect of criteria like reliability, makeability, maintainability and life-cycle costs. The three parties will elaborate the preferred variants in greater detail in the coming period. A joint research programme will also be set up between the Delft University of Technology and the Texan universities. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
August 24, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130824131602.htm | NASA's HS3 mission analyzes Saharan dust layer over Eastern Atlantic | One of two of NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft flew over the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin and investigated the Saharan Air Layer in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean on Aug. 20 and 21. The instruments aboard the Global Hawk sampled the environment of ex-Erin and revealed an elevated dust layer overrunning the storm. | "Our goal with this flight was to look at how the Saharan air would move around or into the former storm, but the circulation was so shallow and weak that, according to our instruments, the Saharan air simply moved westward right over what was left of Erin,"said Scott A. Braun, HS3 principal investigator and a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.Two Global Hawks are flying as part of HS3, short for NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel mission, this year out of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va. Global Hawk aircraft are well-suited for hurricane investigations because they can fly for as long as 28 hours and over-fly hurricanes at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet (18.3 km).One of the purposes of the HS3 mission is to address the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer in tropical storm formation and intensification. On its first flight out of Wallops, a Global Hawk obtained data about the SAL using several instruments aboard.The Cloud Physics Lidar, or CPL, instrument analyzed the SAL and showed an elevated dust layer between about 1.5 and 2.8 miles (2.5 and 4.5 km) overrunning the remnants of Erin. The low-level clouds associated with what was left of Erin were located below 1.2 miles (2 km).The CPL is an airborne lidar system designed specifically for studying clouds and aerosols. CPL will study cloud- and dust-layer boundaries and will provide optical depth or thickness of aerosols and clouds.Another instrument aboard the Global Hawk measured temperature and dewpoint. "The scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder showed very dry air over the remnants of Erin," Braun said.The Global Hawk is expected to make another trip to analyze the Saharan Air Layer on Aug. 24-25.HS3 is a mission that brings together several NASA centers with federal and university partners to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. Among those factors, HS3 will address the controversial role of the hot, dry and dusty Saharan Air Layer in tropical storm formation and intensification and the extent to which deep convection in the inner-core region of storms is a key driver of intensity change.The HS3 mission will operate between Aug. 20 and Sept. 23. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 and usually peaks in early to mid-September.Wallops is one of several NASA centers involved with the HS3 mission. The Earth Science Projects Office at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages the project. Other participants include Goddard, NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.The HS3 mission is funded by NASA Headquarters in Washington and managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and is one of five large field campaigns operating under the Earth Venture program. The HS3 mission also involves collaborations with various partners including the National Centers for Environmental Prediction; Naval Postgraduate School; Naval Research Laboratory; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division and Earth System Research Laboratory; Northrop Grumman Space Technology; National Center for Atmospheric Research; State University of New York at Albany; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Wisconsin; and University of Utah. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
August 22, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822164019.htm | U.S. federal agencies remapping coastal areas damaged by Hurricane Sandy | A day after the administration released the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force progress report, three U.S. federal agencies have announced plans for remapping parts of the East Coast, where Hurricane Sandy altered seafloors and shorelines, destroyed buildings, and disrupted millions of lives last year. | NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are using emergency supplemental funds provided by Congress to survey coastal waters and shorelines, acquiring data that will update East Coast land maps and nautical charts.Using ships, aircraft, and satellites, the agencies will measure water depths, look for submerged debris, and record altered shorelines in high priority areas from South Carolina to Maine, as stipulated by Congress in the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013. The areas to be remapped will be based on their relative dangers to navigation, effects from the storm, and discussions with state and local officials as well as the maritime industry."Our approach is to map once, then use the data for many purposes," said NOAA Rear Admiral Gerd Glang, director of NOAA's Office of Coast Survey. "Under the Ocean and Coastal Mapping Integration Act, NOAA and its federal partners are taking a 'whole ocean' approach to get as much useful information as possible from every dollar invested to help states build more resilient coastlines."The data, much of which will be stored at NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, and through NOAA's Digital Coast, will be open to local, state, and federal agencies as well as academia and the general public. The information can be applied to updating nautical charts, removing marine debris, replenishing beaches, making repairs, and planning for future storms and coastal resilience.The three federal agencies are collaborating for greater topographic and hydrographic coverage and to promote efficiency. Earlier this year, a NOAA navigation response team surveyed the waters around Liberty Island and Ellis Island in New York harbor, measuring water depths and searching for debris that could cause a danger to navigation. Also, NOAA Ship NOAA plans to contract with commercial firms for additional hydrographic survey projects and high resolution topographic and bathymetric elevation data and imagery in the region.The U.S. Geological Survey will collect very high-resolution elevation data to support scientific studies related to the hurricane recovery and rebuilding activities, watershed planning and resource management. USGS will collect data in coastal and inland areas depending on their hurricane damages and the age and quality of existing data. The elevation data will become part of a new initiative, called the 3D Elevation Program, to systematically acquire improved, high-resolution elevation data across the United States."The human deaths and the powerful landscape-altering destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy are a stark reminder that our nation must become more resilient to coastal hazards," said Kevin Gallagher, associate director for Core Science Systems at USGS. "Sandy's most fundamental lesson is that storm vulnerability is a direct consequence of the elevation of coastal communities in relation to storm waves. Communities will benefit greatly from the higher resolution and accuracy of new elevation information to better prepare for storm impacts, develop response strategies, and design resilient and cost-efficient post-storm redevelopment."The Army Corps of Engineers and its Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise are covering particular project areas in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. They will coordinate operations, research, and development in airborne lidar bathymetry and complementary technologies for USACE, NOAA, and the U.S. Navy.Preliminary U.S. damage estimates are near $50 billion, making Sandy the second-costliest cyclone to hit the United States since 1900. There were at least 147 direct deaths recorded across the Atlantic basin due to Sandy, with 72 of these fatalities occurring in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. This is the greatest number of U.S. direct fatalities related to a tropical cyclone outside of the southern states since Hurricane Agnes in 1972. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
August 19, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819130137.htm | After 10 years of service, NOAA retires GOES-12 satellite | GOES-12 has seen it all, from Hurricane Katrina that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, to the Christmas blizzard that crippled the Central United States in 2009. It even traveled south of the equator to provide coverage for South America starting in 2010. Now, after more than 10 years of stellar service, NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-12 spacecraft is being retired. | Launched on July 23, 2001, the satellite lasted well beyond its original operational design life of two years for on-orbit storage and five years of actual operations to support forecasters and scientists in NOAA's National Weather Service."GOES-12 gave the Western Hemisphere many years of reliable data as the operational eastern GOES for accurate forecasts, from small storms to those of historic proportions," said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for NOAA's Satellite and Information Service.Built by Space Systems/Loral, GOES-12 became operational April 1, 2003 as the GOES-East satellite, monitoring weather across the U.S. East Coast and part of the Atlantic Ocean. On May 10, 2010, when GOES-12 was no longer able to be maintained to meet the requirements of the National Weather Service, it was shifted to a new position, where it provided coverage of weather conditions affecting South America, including volcanic ash clouds, wildfires, and drought.When NOAA decommissions a geostationary satellite like GOES-12, it is boosted further into orbit, the remaining fuel is expended, the battery is disabled and the transmitters are turned off. These maneuvers reduce the chances the satellite will collide with other operational spacecraft. Additionally, decommissioning lowers the risk of orbital debris and stops the satellite from transmitting any signals that could interfere with any current or future spacecraft.Hovering 22,300 miles above the Equator, NOAA continues to operate GOES-13, which serves as the GOES East satellite for the United States and GOES-15, which is the GOES West satellite. NOAA also has an orbital backup geostationary satellite, GOES-14, which can be activated if any of the operational satellites experience trouble.Kicza added: "The NOAA-NASA partnership is making steady progress toward developing and launching the more advanced GOES-R satellite series to position us into the future."GOES-R is expected to more than double the clarity of today's GOES imagery and provide more atmospheric observations than current capabilities with more frequent images.Data from the GOES-R instruments will be used to create many different products that will help NOAA meteorologists and other users monitor the atmosphere, land, ocean and the sun. GOES-R will also carry a new Geostationary Lightning Mapper that will provide for the first time a continuous surveillance of total lightning activity throughout the Americas and adjacent oceans.In addition to GOES, NOAA also operates the polar operational environmental satellite (POES) program satellites, the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program series satellites and the Suomi NPP spacecraft. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
July 24, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130724200557.htm | Changes proposed to New Orleans area levee systems | Less may mean more when it comes to the levee systems designed to protect New Orleans from hurricanes. | That's the conclusion of a new study by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers led by Joannes Westerink, chair of the department of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences and co-developer of the authoritative computer model for storm surge used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the state of Louisiana to determine water levels due to hurricane surge and to design levee heights and alignments.The lower Mississippi River south of New Orleans protrudes into the Gulf of Mexico, andhu man-made levees line the west bank of the river for 55 kilometers of what is known as the Lower Plaquemines section. There are no levees on the east side of this stretch of the river. Westerink points out that, historically, sustained easterly winds from hurricanes have directed storm surge across Breton Sound into the Mississippi River and against its west bank levees."This study clearly shows that the man-built west bank levees on the lower Mississippi River enhance the capture of storm surge by the river," Westerink said. "The surges are generated by the prevalent easterly winds that are common for regional hurricanes, but they spill into the river. These surges then propagate upriver, endangering New Orleans from the river side."As an alternative, the study shows that the lowering of human-made levees along the Lower Plaquemines river section to their natural state, to allow storm surge to partially pass across the Mississippi River, will decrease storm surge upriver toward New Orleans."By eliminating the 55 kilometers of human-made levees on the west bank of the river from Pointe a la Hache and Venice, the surges propagating in the river from Pointe a la Hache past New Orleans will be lowered by up to two meters," Westerink said. "This would save billions of dollars in levee construction to protect communities upriver from Pointe a la Hache."The study also shows that the size of surges captured by the river actually decreases with a high-stage river."While higher flow and stages on the river do cause the storm surge to rise on top of the river water levels, causing overall higher water levels for a specific hurricane, the storm surge does not simply linearly add to the pre-storm river water levels," Westerink said. "In fact, the surges captured by the river reduce as the river water levels rise."The researchers are aware that eliminating the human-made levees on the west bank might potentially endanger the few sparsely populated areas along the lower west bank of the Mississippi."For the few communities south of the Pointe a la Hache, the study suggests building strong and high ring citadel levees around them and then connecting these communities with a bridge, much as the Florida Keys are," Westerink said.The researchers note that, historically, the design of Southeast Louisiana's hurricane flood risk reduction system has hinged on raising and adding levees in response to river or hurricane events that impact the region. Now, it may be time to think and build smarter."The study suggests building smarter citadel flood protection systems in the delta instead of long north-south linear systems that follow the river," Westerink said. "This reduces flooding risk, works with nature in that sediments can get to the delta from both the river and from hurricanes and thus build up the delta, and reduces levee construction costs by billions."The group's study appears in the Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal and Ocean Engineering. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
July 18, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130718111333.htm | Hurricane season: Predicting in advance what could happen | A Sandia National Laboratories team is gearing up for hurricane season, readying analyses to help people in the eye of a storm. | The Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), jointly housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, studies how hurricanes and other disasters disrupt critical infrastructure, such as roads, electricity and water systems.Hurricane season began June 1 and runs through Nov. 30. It generally peaks in August and September, notwithstanding Superstorm Sandy's appearance late last October.With the onset of hurricane season, NISAC has two jobs: conducting annual "hurricane swath" analyses of probable impacts on the Gulf Coast and East Coast and providing quick analyses of crisis response in the face of an imminent hurricane threat to the United States.A swath analysis looks at how a hurricane might interrupt critical services and at impacts to infrastructure specific to an area, such as petroleum and petrochemical industries in Houston or financial services in New York City. It also looks at such things as the economic impact of the storm or how it could upset food deliveries.Federal officials pull swath analyses off the shelf when a hurricane seems likely to hit a particular place. They used the New Orleans report a few days before Hurricane Isaac headed toward that city last August."While it was too far out for us to do our analysis, they could use the report as a first cut," said Dan Pless, NISAC program lead at Sandia.NISAC's portfolio includes a dozen swath analyses updated every few years, two cities at a time. A team coordinated by Mark Pepple, NISAC fast response lead, this year updated reports for Houston and Corpus Christi, Texas; last year the work focused on Miami and Tampa. Updates keep information from becoming too stale, Pless said.NISAC came up with the original analyses, but is working on updates with state and local officials and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).Each report uses a "reasonable bad scenario" that would be possible in the particular area, with local officials deciding what scenario would be most useful for disaster planning, said Pless and Pepple. For example, a Category 5 hurricane isn't likely in New York City because colder waters dampen hurricane strength, but a Category 3 is within reason."These storms form in the Caribbean, they form in the Gulf. They can get quite strong down there," Pless said. "They don't form in the North Atlantic. They have to travel there."The analyses -- also useful in other natural disasters -- consider impacts to the infrastructure, the population and the economy, Pless said."We look at where power outages are likely," he said. "For Houston, it would examine the possible national impact on petroleum supplies and whether we should worry about that."They look at so-called food deserts: urban areas where food delivery might be interrupted, he said.NISAC also has found that some local officials want more demographic information. Officials in Florida, with its high retiree population, want to know where the elderly are concentrated, Pless said.The most difficult part of an analysis is defining a scenario because every place is different and a wide range of agencies must reach consensus, he said.Once NISAC is activated, the team focuses on exactly what's in the storm's projected path."Anytime a hurricane is going to make landfall in the U.S. we're busy at some level. If it's going to be a Category 3 or higher, you can pretty much figure we're going to go to full activation," Pless said. The decision whether to activate and to what degree comes from NISAC's program manager at the DHS.Pepple helps lead NISAC's crisis response. When federal officials activate a team, he coordinates with DHS and Sandia's partners at Los Alamos, which has its own team doing analyses. The labs collaborate. For example, Los Alamos models and analyzes the impacts to electricity and metropolitan water systems, and Sandia uses those results to look at impacts to energy such as petroleum and natural gas or sectors such as transportation and banking.He's also responsible for getting Sandia's team together, not just pulling in people, but identifying what expertise or simulation tools are needed. While a crisis response team always needs at least one economist to assess economic impact, a hurricane in Houston would require more analyses of the petrochemical sector than a hurricane in North Carolina, where agriculture could be a larger concern.NISAC and DHS collaborate on how much time the team has before it locks in a prediction of the hurricane's track toward land. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issues regular landfall projections. At some point, NISAC has to lock in a storm track, or prediction, on which to base analyses.The amount of time for analysis is shrinking, Pless said. NISAC had 48 hours for Hurricane Gustav, which hit the South in late August and early September 2008."They said that's too much time, the track can change too much in that time," Pless said.The team had 24 hours to do its analysis for Hurricane Ike, which hit the Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi coasts in September 2008. By the time Irene hit the East Coast in August 2011, the deadline had dropped to 12 hours. "We're roughly around 10 to 11 hours at this point," Pless said.The team provides similar information as for a swath analysis, with less detail but using the hurricane's strength and what's in its path. Sometimes the team adds a caveat that damage could be worse if the storm changes path.The team also responds to a flurry of questions from DHS just before landfall. For Ike, Pless said, officials wanted to know which large Houston-area water treatment plants were most likely to lose power and would need one of three available FEMA generators.For Sandy, NISAC's report identified subways in the storm surge zone and did some power outage modeling. NISAC's analyses complement those done by the Department of Energy or other agencies by providing unique evaluations of how damage to one type of infrastructure, such as power lines, would impact other infrastructures. As the designated sector-specific agency for the energy infrastructure sector, DOE's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability helps prepare for and respond to energy-related emergencies like Hurricane Sandy.Questions to the team usually spike after a hurricane hits. That was particularly true for Sandy."You had this massive power outage and they were wondering, 'OK, we have these cell towers and a lot of them have diesel generators for backup. Those last 48 to 72 hours and the power isn't coming back in 48 to 72 hours. How do we prioritize that? Few of the gas stations have fuel, what's going on? Is it that they don't have power or because eight of the nine fuel delivery terminals in New Jersey were down?'" Pless recalled.Sandy reversed the normal workload. "Usually we have a lot heavier workload going into the hurricane before landfall and generally have tired people and a lighter workload afterward. On Sandy, we worked the opposite. We had a relatively light workload going in and then it got really busy," Pless said. "That was because it was that weird perfect storm." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
July 16, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130716173807.htm | 'Brown ocean' can fuel inland tropical cyclones | In the summer of 2007, Tropical Storm Erin stumped meteorologists. Most tropical cyclones dissipate after making landfall, weakened by everything from friction and wind shear to loss of the ocean as a source of heat energy. Not Erin. The storm intensified as it tracked through Texas. It formed an eye over Oklahoma. As it spun over the southern plains, Erin grew stronger than it ever had been over the ocean. | Erin is an example of a newly defined type of inland tropical cyclone that maintains or increases strength after landfall, according to NASA-funded research by Theresa Andersen and J. Marshall Shepherd of the University of Georgia in Athens.Before making landfall, tropical storms gather power from the warm waters of the ocean. Storms in the newly defined category derive their energy instead from the evaporation of abundant soil moisture -- a phenomenon that Andersen and Shepherd call the "brown ocean.""The land essentially mimics the moisture-rich environment of the ocean, where the storm originated," Andersen said.The study is the first global assessment of the post-landfall strength and structure of inland tropical cyclones, and the weather and environmental conditions in which they occur."A better understanding of inland storm subtypes, and the differences in the physical processes that drive them, could ultimately improve forecasts," Andersen said. "Prediction and earlier warnings can help minimize damage and loss of life from severe flooding, high winds, and other tropical cyclone hazards."The study was published March 2013 in the To better understand tropical cyclones that survive beyond landfall, Andersen and Shepherd accessed data archived by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center for tropical cyclones from 1979 to 2008. Storms had to meet the criteria of retaining a measureable central pressure by the time they tracked at least 220 miles (350 kilometers) inland, away from the maritime influence of the nearest coast. Next they obtained atmospheric and environmental data for before and after the storms from NASA's Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications.Of the 227 inland tropical cyclones identified, 45 maintained or increased strength, as determined by their wind speed and central pressure. The researchers show, however, that not all such storms are fueled equally.In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the destructive power of extratropical cyclones -- a well-studied storm type that undergoes a known physical and thermal transition. These systems begin as warm-core tropical cyclones that derive energy from the ocean. Over land, the storms transition to cold-core extratropical cyclones that derive energy from clashes between different air masses. Of the study's 45 inland storms that maintained or increased strength, 17 belonged to this category.Tropical Storm Erin, however, is among the newly described storm category that accounted for 16 of the 45 tropical cyclones. Instead of transitioning from a warm-core to cold-core system, these storms maintain their tropical warm-core characteristics. The storm type, which Andersen and Shepherd call tropical cyclone maintenance and intensification events, or TCMIs, have the potential to deliver much more rainfall than their extratropical counterparts."Until events like Erin in 2007, there was not much focus on post-landfall tropical cyclones unless they transitioned," Andersen said. "Erin really brought attention to the inland intensification of tropical cyclones.""This is particularly critical since a study by former National Hurricane Center Deputy Director Ed Rappaport found that 59 percent of fatalities in landfalling tropical cyclones are from inland freshwater flooding," Shepherd said.While most inland tropical cyclones occur in the United States and China, the hotspot for TCMIs during the 30-year study period turned out to be Australia. The uneven geographic distribution led Andersen and Shepherd to investigate the environment and conditions surrounding the brown ocean phenomenon that gives rise to the storms.Andersen and Shepherd show that a brown ocean environment consists of three observable conditions. First, the lower level of the atmosphere mimics a tropical atmosphere with minimal variation in temperature. Second, soils in the vicinity of the storms need to contain ample moisture. Finally, evaporation of the soil moisture releases latent heat, which the team found must measure at least 70 watts averaged per square meter. For comparison, the latent heat flux from the ocean averages about 200 watts per square meter.Indeed, all three conditions were present when Erin tracked across the U.S. Gulf Coast and Midwest. Still, questions remain about the factors -- such as variations in climate, soil and vegetation -- that make Australia the region where brown ocean conditions most often turn up.The research also points to possible implications for storms' response to climate change. "As dry areas get drier and wet areas get wetter, are you priming the soil to get more frequent inland tropical cyclone intensification?" asked Shepherd. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
July 16, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130716102103.htm | Long-buried seawall protected homes from Hurricane Sandy's record storm surge | Picture two residential beach communities on the New Jersey shore: Bay Head and Mantoloking, which sit side-by-side in Ocean County on a narrow barrier island that separates the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay. | Before Hurricane Sandy landed on Oct. 29, 2012, a motorist traveling north on Ocean Avenue would seamlessly travel through Mantoloking into Bay Head, noticing few changes in residential development, dunes, beaches, and shoreline.The difference was hidden under the sand.A forgotten, 1,260-meter seawall buried beneath the beach helped Bay Head weather Sandy's record storm surges and large waves over multiple high tides, according to a team of engineers and geoscientists led by Jennifer L. Irish, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and an authority on storm surge, tsunami inundation, and erosion.The stone structure dates back to 1882. Its reappearance surprised many area residents, underscoring the difficulties transient communities have in planning for future threats at their shores, the researchers said."It's amazing that a seawall built nearly 150 years ago, naturally hidden under beach sands, and forgotten, should have a major positive effect under the conditions in which it was originally designed to perform," said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "This finding should have major implications for planning, as sea level rises and storms increase in intensity in response to global warming."The discovery, now online in the journal "Once we got there, we immediately saw the seawall," Irish said. "The beach and dunes did their job to a certain point, then, the seawall took over, providing significant dampening of the waves. It was the difference between houses that were flooded in Bay Head and houses that were reduced to piles of rubble in Mantoloking."With recovery efforts under way and storms still circulating through the area, Irish and Robert Weiss, an assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, with Patrick Lynett, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, documented high water marks, damage, overwash, and breaches of the barrier island.All oceanfront homes in the two boroughs were damaged, ranging from ground-floor flooding to complete destruction. As measured by water lines on the interior of homes, flooding was similar in both boroughs. The difference was the extent of the storm's impact.In Mantoloking, the entire dune almost vanished. Water washed over the barrier spit and opened three breaches of 165 meters, 59 meters, and 35 meters, where the land was swept away. In Bay Head, only the portion of the dune located seaward of the seawall was eroded and the section of dune behind the seawall received only minor local scouring.Later, using Google Earth to evaluate aerial images taken two years before and immediately after Hurricane Sandy, the research team evaluated houses, labeling a structure with a different roofline as damaged, one that no longer sits on its foundation as destroyed, and the remaining houses as flooded.The researchers classified 88 percent of the oceanfront homes in Bay Head as flooded, with just one oceanfront home destroyed. In Mantoloking, more than half of the oceanfront homes were classified as damaged or destroyed.Despite the immense magnitude and duration of the storm, a relatively small coastal obstacle reduced potential wave loads by a factor of two and was the difference between widespread destruction and minor structural impacts, the researchers said."We have a great deal of compassion for the people who have had to endure the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in Bay Head and Mantoloking," Irish said. "It will have little solace, but we are left with a clear, unintentional example of the need for multiple levels of defense that include hard structures and beach nourishment to protect coastal communities."This research was supported by the National Science Foundation via grant EAR-1312813.Additional researchers include Wei Cheng of the Department of Geosciences and Stephanie Smallegan of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
July 15, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130715135634.htm | Distorted GPS signals reveal hurricane wind speeds | By pinpointing locations on Earth from space, GPS systems have long shown drivers the shortest route home and guided airline pilots across oceans. Now, by figuring out how messed up GPS satellite signals get when bouncing around in a storm, researchers have found a way to do something completely different with GPS: measure and map the wind speeds of hurricanes. | Improved wind speed measurements could help meteorologists better predict the severity of storms and where they might be headed, said Stephen Katzberg, a Distinguished Research Associate at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and a leader in the development of the new GPS technique. On a global scale, experts hope to use the new measurement method to better understand how storms form and what guides their behavior.The new technique could inexpensively provide a much more extensive view of a storm's wind speeds than currently possible, its developers say. Test flights on storm-hunting airplanes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) -- nicknamed Hurricane Hunters -demonstrate that the system provides valuable information at little additional cost, according to Katzberg and his colleagues.An article describing the scientists' methods and findings has been accepted for publication in Radio Science, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.Hovering thousands of miles above Earth, GPS satellites constantly beam radio waves toward the ground carrying information about both the position of the satellite and the time the message was sent out. These radio waves can reflect off a surface similar to the way visible light reflects off a mirror.When a radio wave from a GPS satellite strikes the surface of a body of water, such as the ocean, about 60 percent of the signal reflects back toward the sky, Katzberg said. Unlike a mirror, however, the surface of the ocean is rarely calm and flat. Wind blowing over a body of water generates heaving waves."Imagine you blow on a hot bowl of soup," he explained. "The harder you blow, the bigger the 'waves' are in the bowl." When a GPS signal strikes a wave, the rough surface distorts the reflection by scattering the signals in various directions."The radio wave bounces off the waves," said Katzberg. "As the surface gets rougher, the reflections get more disturbed and that's what we measure."The new method of calculating wind speeds is the fruit of years of fine-tuning by scientists from NASA and NOAA, Katzberg added. In operation, the measurements are taken by GPS receiver chips, similar to those found in smartphones, located inside the aircraft. A computer compares signals coming directly from satellites above with the reflections from the sea below and calculates an approximate wind speed with better than 5 meters per second (about 11 miles per hour) accuracy. The wind speed of a mid-range, Category 3 hurricane, for comparison, is about 55 meters per second (123 miles per hour).In order to measure hurricane wind speeds using the standard method, scientists drop a 16-inch-long tube packed with scientific instruments called a dropsonde. These dropsondes are attached to small parachutes and jettisoned from airplanes, gathering information during their descent. Each device measures pressure, humidity and temperature in addition to wind speed. A typical Hurricane Hunter mission uses about 20 single-use dropsondes, each costing around $750.Dropsondes provide 10 times more precise wind speed measurements than the new GPS method can, so far. Their accuracy is about 0.5 meters per second (1.1 miles per hour).But, since the dropsondes are so expensive, their releases are spread out around and in storms. This distance means meteorologists need to use some guesswork to fill in the gaps. According to Katzberg, the reflected GPS signal system can essentially run non-stop, constantly gathering information about the wind below. The ultimate goal isn't to replace dropsondes, but rather to add a much broader view of wind speeds to the data the dropsondes provide."You were already going to have these GPS systems onboard, so why not get additional information about the environment around you," said Katzberg.Since the method requires large bodies of water to work, the system can't be used over land. Also, in cases where the ocean's surface is choppy without any wind, such as the eye of a storm, Katzberg says other tools would need to be used instead to get an accurate measurement.Although the new measurement technique is being tested on planes, it may get implemented on satellites, according to Katzberg. In 2016, NASA plans to launch a system of small satellites, called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), to measure reflected GPS satellite signals from low orbit to monitor storm wind speeds from space.And, looking further into the future, reflections of powerful satellite broadcasts from DirecTV and Sirius XM Radio could be used in addition to GPS."Those signals are extremely powerful and easy to detect," said Katzberg. "These satellites cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, but our system only costs a few hundred. We're taking advantage of the expensive infrastructure that's already there." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
June 30, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130630145025.htm | El Nino unusually active in the late 20th century: Is it because of global warming? | Spawning droughts, floods, and other weather disturbances world-wide, the El Niño -- Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts the daily life of millions of people. During El Niño, Atlantic hurricane activity wanes and rainfall in Hawaii decreases while Pacific winter storms shift southward, elevating the risk of floods in California. | The ability to forecast how ENSO will respond to global warming thus matters greatly to society. Providing accurate predictions, though, is challenging because ENSO varies naturally over decades and centuries. Instrumental records are too short to determine whether any changes seen recently are simply natural or attributable to human-made greenhouse gases. Reconstructions of ENSO behavior are usually missing adequate records for the tropics where ENSO develops.Help is now underway in the form of a tree-ring record reflecting ENSO activity over the past seven centuries. Tree-rings have been shown to be very good proxies for temperature and rainfall measurements. An international team of scientists spearheaded by Jinbao Li and Shang-Ping Xie, while working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, has compiled 2,222 tree-ring chronologies of the past seven centuries from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. Their work is published in the June 30, 2013 online issue of The inclusion of tropical tree-ring records enabled the team to generate an archive of ENSO activity of unprecedented accuracy, as attested by the close correspondence with records from equatorial Pacific corals and with an independent Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction that captures well-known teleconnection climate patterns.These proxy records all indicate that ENSO was unusually active in the late 20th century compared to the past seven centuries, implying that this climate phenomenon is responding to ongoing global warming."In the year after a large tropical volcanic eruption, our record shows that the east-central tropical Pacific is unusually cool, followed by unusual warming one year later. Like greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols perturb the Earth's radiation balance. This supports the idea that the unusually high ENSO activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming," explains lead author Jinbao Li."Many climate models do not reflect the strong ENSO response to global warming that we found," says co-author Shang-Ping Xie, meteorology professor at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa and Roger Revelle Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. "This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases. Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future ENSO activity. If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
June 17, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617130556.htm | NASA's 2013 HS3 hurricane mission to delve into Saharan dust | NASA's 2013 Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel or HS3 mission will investigate whether Saharan dust and its associated warm and dry air, known as the Saharan Air Layer or SAL, favors or suppresses the development of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean. The effects of Saharan dust on tropical cyclones is a controversial area of science. During the 2012 campaign, NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft gathered valuable data on the dust layer that swirled around Tropical Storm Nadine for several days. | The Saharan dust layer is composed of sand and other mineral particles that are swept up in air currents and whisked westward over the Atlantic Ocean. The extreme daytime heating of the Sahara creates instability in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, warming and drying the air near the surface and cooling and moistening the air near the top of the dust layer near 5 kilometers (16,500 feet). Once it exits the African coast, the dust-laden air moves over air that is cooler, and moister, and it's the temperature inversion of warm air over cold that prevents deep cloud development. This suppression of deep cloud formation along with the dry air within the dust layer is reasons why this Saharan air layer is sometimes thought to suppress tropical cyclone development. On the other hand, the southern boundary of this hot desert air essentially acts like a front whose attendant wind patterns are a major source of the African waves that are precursors to storm formation.Some Saharan dust has been known to make the journey across the Atlantic and to the U.S. east coast. But Saharan dust doesn't just cause sunrises to appear more reddish, the dust also impacts the development of clouds and precipitation. The dust particles can provide a surface for small cloud droplets and ice crystals to form within clouds. More dust particles means that a given amount of available water is spread onto more particles, creating large numbers of small drops and delaying the formation of larger raindrops. Those effects, coupled with the warm and dry air, have presented challenges to meteorologists who have been trying to understand the effect of Saharan dust on tropical cyclones.HS3 addresses the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer, or SAL, in tropical storm formation and intensification by taking measurements from three instruments on board the Global Hawk. These instruments include a cloud physics lidar which uses a laser to measure vertical profiles of dust; a dropsonde system that releases small instrumented packages from the aircraft that fall to the surface while measuring profiles of temperature, humidity, and winds; and an infrared sounder that measures temperature and humidity in clear-sky regions.On Sept. 11 and 12, during the 2012 HS3 mission, the NASA Global Hawk aircraft covered more than one million square kilometers (386,100 square miles) going back and forth over the storm in a gridded fashion in what's called a "lawnmower pattern."The SAL was present primarily during that first flight, and again on the flight from Sept. 14 to 15. "The SAL did not act to suppress development on Sept. 11 and 12, at least not in the sense of a direct intrusion into the storm circulation, but it is too early to say what role it might have played in other ways and in other flights," said Scott Braun, HS3 Principal Investigator, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "There is some evidence that it (the SAL) was getting into the storm circulation on Sept. 14 and 15, but the extent to which it impacted development is unclear."The dust data collected by the Global Hawk is important for scientific studies on the SAL. Other data was useful operationally to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the entity that issues forecasts for tropical cyclones. The forecasters at the NHC used data from dropsondes released from the Global Hawk in the discussion of Nadine at 11 a.m. EDT on Sept. 20, "The current intensity is kept at 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kmh)…is in good agreement with dropsonde data from the NASA global hawk aircraft and AMSU [satellite instrument] estimates."Valuable data from the Global Hawk dropsondes on September 22-23 provided the National Hurricane Center with information that contributed to their reclassifying the storm as a tropical storm after one day of being called a post-tropical low. Shortly after HS3's last flight into Nadine on September 26-27, Nadine actually strengthened back into a hurricane and reached its maximum intensity.Dropsonde data from HS3's flight on September 26-27 showed that temperature and humidity conditions in the storm were becoming more favorable for the occurrence of deep thunderstorms. Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite on Sept. 28, 2012, revealed that strong convection and thunderstorms did build up again and strengthened Nadine back into a hurricane.HS3 is a five-year mission specifically targeted to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin.For NASA's storm history of Hurricane Nadine, visit: For more information about easterly waves, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
June 11, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130611130919.htm | Brown tide has emerged off Long Island, NY in Moriches, Quantuck and Shinnecock Bay, but not in Great South Bay | A brown tide has emerged within some, but not all, of Long Island's south shore estuaries. Monitoring by the Gobler Laboratory in the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences has revealed that a brown tide has developed in eastern Moriches Bay, Quantuck Bay, and western Shinnecock Bay. | Abundances of the brown tide organism in this region progressively increased through the month of May and were recorded at maximal densities of more than 800,000 cells per milliliter in western Shinnecock Bay as of June 1st. Densities above 50,000 cells per milliliter can be harmful to marine life.The brown tide alga, Dr. Christopher Gobler, a Professor within Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences whose laboratory generated the brown tide data, indicated that the distribution of this year's brown tide comes as good news to some and bad news to others."The absence of a brown tide in Great South Bay may be a 'Gift from Sandy'," Gobler said. "Since the new inlet was created following the Hurricane Sandy, we've seen higher salinity, lower chlorophyll, lower nitrogen, and stronger flushing in eastern Great South Bay. The inability of the brown tide organism to form a bloom in this region is consistent with these conditions and should help promote the growth of hard clams and eelgrass in this bay."The news for the eastern regions of the Long Island's south shore was not as good."The combination of poor flushing and intensive nitrogen loading into the eastern Moriches-western Shinnecock Bay region makes it highly vulnerable to algal blooms," said Gobler. "We had hoped that the cooler spring and the efforts of the Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program to restock filter feeding shellfish in the Bay might restrict this year's bloom. We are still hopeful that these filter feeders may make this year's bloom less intense in this region than it has been in recent years," said Gobler noting that in 2011 and 2012, cell densities of the brown tide were more than twice as dense as the current bloom at two million cells per milliliter. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
June 4, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130604153339.htm | Tiny airplanes and subs could be next hurricane hunters | Kamran Mohseni envisions a day when the unmanned vehicles in his laboratory at the University of Florida will swarm over, under and through hurricanes to help predict the strength and path of the storms. | The tiny, autonomous craft -- some fly, others dart under the waves -- can spy on hurricanes at close range without getting blown willy-nilly, while sensors onboard collect and send in real time the data scientists need to predict the intensity and trajectory of storms: pressure, temperature, humidity, location and time.Mohseni said people always ask him how the miniature flying machines -- just 6 inches long and about the weight of an iPod Nano -- can take on one of the monster storms."Our vehicles don't fight the hurricane; we use the hurricane to take us places," said Mohseni, the W.P. Bushnell Endowed Professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the department of electrical and computer engineering.The aerial and underwater vehicles can be launched with commands from a laptop hundreds of miles from the eye of a hurricane. Mohseni and a team of graduate students use mathematical models to predict regions in the atmosphere and ocean that can give the vehicles a free ride toward their destination. Once in the vicinity, they can be powered off to wait for a particular current of wind or water. When they detect the current they need for navigation, they power back on, slip into the current, then power off again to conserve fuel as the current carries them to a target location.In essence, they can go for a fact-gathering ride on hurricane winds and waters.The devices are a departure from current technology, which uses hurricane reconnaissance aircraft to punch through a storm's eye wall and release dropsondes, sensors that free-fall and might or might not collect helpful data. Underwater data are even more difficult to collect today, although just as important, considering that the warm, moist air on the ocean surface provides fuel for hurricanes.Mohseni's vehicles, even launched hundreds at a time, also reduce the cost of hurricane reconnaissance."If you want to blast through a hurricane, you have to build a bigger airplane," Mohseni said. "[The military] asks for a Batman airplane, a super-duper aircraft that could do everything. But what if you lose one of these super-duper airplanes?"We are going the opposite direction. We don't have anything that is super duper. We have cheap sensors, but with a lot of them you can significantly increase the accuracy of your measurements," said Mohseni, director of UF's new Institute for Networked Autonomous Systems. "You get super duper on an aggregate level."The prototypes produced at the institute are about $250 apiece and are too small and lightweight to cause damage when they hit something, a big consideration in hurricane-force winds and waves. Mohseni does not use a landing strip to test the aerial vehicles; he just tells them to crash, picks them up and flies them again. The carbon fiber shell of the aerial vehicles is wafer-thin but resilient. With proper funding, Mohseni said, the vehicles could be tested in a real-world hurricane in two or three years.In instances where many are lost -- as in a hurricane -- the data gained outweighs the cost of the lost vehicles, Mohseni said. Production costs would drop if the vehicles were mass-produced.The vehicles also are smart. Mohseni developed a cooperative control algorithm that allows them to form a network and learn from the data they take in, for example, by adjusting their course when needed. This feature makes them useful for applications beyond hurricanes.Extreme environments, such as the polar ice caps, are difficult and hazardous to measure with standard technology. Mohseni said heat transfer through polar ice between the ocean and the air goes almost completely unmeasured today but could be safely measured with the aerial vehicles, which can be launched from a laptop aboard a ship and send back climate data in real time.Vehicles so tiny, powerful and smart would have been far-fetched even 10 years ago, Mohseni said, but advances in microfabrication, communications, computer processing and computation have led to sophisticated technology in small packages. Nevertheless, Mohseni also has drawn inspiration from seemingly less-sophisticated sources, such as jellyfish.Mohseni had been studying fluid dynamics, working on propulsion, when a biologist mentioned that jellyfish navigate in much the same way as the mechanical system Mohseni wanted to develop. After studying jellyfish, cuttlefish and squid, Mohseni developed a mathematical model of their thrust and used that model to develop the motors for his underwater sensor vehicles. He now has small submarines capable of autonomous docking using technology mimicking jellyfish and squid, and the sea creatures are common fixtures in his laboratory."With biomimicry, learning from what nature does," Mohseni said, "you just sort of get amazed." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
June 1, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130601133656.htm | North Atlantic hurricane forecast predicts above-average season | Scientists at the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) who developed a unique computer model with a knack for predicting hurricanes with unprecedented accuracy are forecasting a season of above-average activity. | Tim LaRow, associate research scientist at COAPS, and his colleagues released their fifth annual Atlantic hurricane season forecast today. Hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through Nov. 30.This year's forecast calls for a 70 percent probability of 12 to 17 named storms with five to 10 of the storms developing into hurricanes. The mean forecast is 15 named storms, eight of them hurricanes, and an average accumulated cyclone energy (a measure of the strength and duration of storms accumulated during the season) of 135."The forecast mean numbers are identical to the observed 1995 to 2010 average named storms and hurricanes and reflect the ongoing period of heightened tropical activity in the North Atlantic," LaRow said.The COAPS forecast is slightly less than the official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast that predicts a 70 percent probability of 13 to 20 named storms with seven to 11 of those developing into hurricanes this season.LaRow and his colleagues at COAPS use a numerical climate model developed at Florida State to understand seasonal predictability of hurricane activity. The model is one of only a handful of numerical models in the world being used to study seasonal hurricane activity. The forecast numbers are based on 50 individual seasonal atmospheric forecasts using sea surface temperatures predicted by a recently upgraded NOAA climate model.The COAPS model is already gaining recognition for its accuracy only four years after its launch. In 2012, the forecast predicted an average of 13 named storms and seven hurricanes, and there ended up being 19 named storms and 10 hurricanes."Last year was unusual in that El Niño did not develop as the climate model expected," LaRow said. "El Niño develops when sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are warmer than normal, leading to increased wind shear in the Atlantic, which can disrupt developing tropical systems. Last year, El Niño never developed, and it is not predicted to develop this year."The 2011 forecast predicted an average of 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, and there were actually 19 named storms and seven hurricanes. The 2010 forecast predicted 17 named storms and 10 hurricanes, and there were actually 19 named storms and 12 hurricanes. The 2009 forecast predicted eight named storms and four hurricanes, and there ended up being nine named storms and three hurricanes that year.Reforecasts conducted using data since 1982 show that the model has a mean absolute error of 1.9 hurricanes and 2.3 named storms. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
May 29, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130529130301.htm | NASA’s HS3 mission aircraft to double team 2013 hurricane season | During this year's hurricane season NASA will "double-team" on research with two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft winging their way over storms that develop during the peak of the season. NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3 airborne mission, will revisit the Atlantic Ocean to investigate storms using additional instruments and for the first time two Global Hawks. | "The advantage this year over 2012 is that the second aircraft will measure eyewall and rainband winds and precipitation, something we didn't get to do last year," said Scott Braun, HS3 mission principal investigator and research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "In addition, just as we did in 2012, the first aircraft will examine the large-scale environment that tropical storms form in and move through and how that environment affects the inner workings of the storms."HS3 is a mission that brings together several NASA centers with federal and university partners to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. Among those factors, HS3 will address the controversial role of the hot, dry and dusty Saharan Air Layer in tropical storm formation and intensification, and the extent to which deep convection in the inner-core region of storms is a key driver of intensity change.The HS3 mission will operate between Aug. 20 and Sept. 23. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30 and usually peaks in early to mid-September.The NASA Global Hawks are unmanned aircraft that will be piloted remotely from the HS3 mission base at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va. Global Hawk aircraft are well-suited for hurricane investigations because they can fly for as long as 28 hours and over-fly hurricanes at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet.The second Global Hawk will carry a payload of a Doppler radar for wind and precipitation measurements, a microwave radiometer for surface wind measurements, and a microwave sounder for the measurement of atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles. In addition, an instrument called ADELE (Airborne Detector for Energetic Lightning Emissions) is being added to examine gamma ray emissions caused by lightning. The ADELE instrument first flew on a Gulfstream V aircraft in 2009.The radar and microwave instruments will fly aboard Global Hawk Two for the first time in HS3 and will focus on the inner region of the storms. The High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler conically scanning Doppler radar, the Hurricane Imaging Radiometer, and the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer microwave sounder will be new to the mission this year. These instruments have previously participated in NASA's GRIP (Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) experiment that studied hurricanes during the 2010 season and represent advanced technologies developed by NASA that are precursors to potential future satellite sensorsThis year, one HS3 mission Global Hawk will provide the opportunity to test out a non-hurricane related instrument: the ADELE gamma ray detector.Making a return appearance to NASA Wallops for the 2013 season and flying on Global Hawk One are three instruments to examine the environment of the storms. The scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder, the Advanced Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System also known as dropsondes, and the Cloud Physics Lidar will be mounted in the Global Hawk that will be studying the environment around storms.Wallops Flight Facility is one of several NASA centers involved with the HS3 mission. The Earth Science Projects Office at NASA Ames Research Center manages the project. Other participants include NASA Goddard, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.The HS3 mission is funded by NASA Headquarters and managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program at NASA's Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va., and is one of five large field campaigns operating under the Earth Venture program. The HS3 mission also involves collaborations with various partners including the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Laboratory, NOAA's Hurricane Research Division and Earth System Research Laboratory, Northrop Grumman Space Technology, National Center for Atmospheric Research, State University of New York at Albany, University of Maryland -- Baltimore County, University of Wisconsin, and University of Utah. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
May 24, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130524144951.htm | Active or 'extremely active' Atlantic hurricane season predicted for 2013 | In its 2013 Atlantic hurricane season outlook issued today, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is forecasting an active or extremely active season this year. | For the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, NOAA's Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook says there is a 70 percent likelihood of 13 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 7 to 11 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher).These ranges are well above the seasonal average of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes."With the devastation of Sandy fresh in our minds, and another active season predicted, everyone at NOAA is committed to providing life-saving forecasts in the face of these storms and ensuring that Americans are prepared and ready ahead of time." said Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., NOAA acting administrator. "As we saw first-hand with Sandy, it's important to remember that tropical storm and hurricane impacts are not limited to the coastline. Strong winds, torrential rain, flooding, and tornadoes often threaten inland areas far from where the storm first makes landfall."Three climate factors that strongly control Atlantic hurricane activity are expected to come together to produce an active or extremely active 2013 hurricane season. These are:"This year, oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic basin are expected to produce more and stronger hurricanes," said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. "These conditions include weaker wind shear, warmer Atlantic waters and conducive winds patterns coming from Africa."NOAA's seasonal hurricane outlook is not a hurricane landfall forecast; it does not predict how many storms will hit land or where a storm will strike. Forecasts for individual storms and their impacts will be provided throughout the season by NOAA's National Hurricane Center.New for this hurricane season are improvements to forecast models, data gathering, and the National Hurricane Center communication procedure for post-tropical cyclones. In July, NOAA plans to bring online a new supercomputer that will run an upgraded Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) model that provides significantly enhanced depiction of storm structure and improved storm intensity forecast guidance.Also this year, Doppler radar data will be transmitted in real time from NOAA's Hurricane Hunter aircraft. This will help forecasters better analyze rapidly evolving storm conditions, and these data could further improve the HWRF model forecasts by 10 to 15 percent.The National Weather Service has also made changes to allow for hurricane warnings to remain in effect, or to be newly issued, for storms like Sandy that have become post-tropical. This flexibility allows forecasters to provide a continuous flow of forecast and warning information for evolving or continuing threats. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
May 5, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130505145937.htm | More hurricanes for Hawaii? | News of a hurricane threat sends our hearts racing, glues us to the Internet for updates, and makes us rush to the store to stock up on staples. Hawaii, fortunately, has been largely free from these violent storms in the recent past, only two having made landfall in more than 30 years. | Now a study headed by a team of scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, shows that Hawaii could see a two-to-three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by the last quarter of this century. The study, which appears in the May 5, 2013, online issue of "Computer models run with global warming scenarios generally project a decrease in tropical cyclones worldwide. This, though, may not be what will happen with local communities," says lead author Hiroyuki Murakami.To determine whether tropical cyclones will become more frequent in Hawaii with climate change, Murakami and climate expert Bin Wang at the Meteorology Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa, joined forces with Akio Kitoh at the Meteorological Research Institute and the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The scientists compared in a state-of-the-art, high-resolution global climate model the recent history of tropical cyclones in the North Pacific with a future (2075-2099) scenario, under which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, resulting in temperatures about 2°C higher than today."In our study, we looked at all tropical cyclones, which range in intensity from tropical storms to full-blown category 5 hurricanes. From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaii. Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region," explains Murakami.The main factors responsible for the increase are changes in the large-scale moisture conditions, the flow patterns in the wind, and in surface temperature patterns stemming from global warming.Most hurricanes that might threaten Hawaii now are born in the eastern Pacific, south of the Baja California Peninsula. From June through November the ingredients there are just right for tropical cyclone formation, with warm ocean temperatures, lots of moisture, and weak vertical wind shear. But during the storms' long journey across the 3000 miles to Hawaii, they usually fizzle out due to dry conditions over the subtropical central Pacific and the wind shear from the westerly subtropical jet.Surprisingly, even though fewer tropical cyclones will form in the eastern Pacific in Murakami's future scenario, we can expect more of them to make their way to Hawaii.The upper-level westerly subtropical jet will move poleward so that the mean steering flow becomes easterly. Thus, storms from Baja California are much more likely to make it to Hawaii. Furthermore, since the climate models also project that the equatorial central Pacific will heat up, conditions may become more favorable for hurricane formation in the open ocean to the south or southeast of Hawaii."Our finding that more tropical cyclones will approach Hawaii as Earth continues to warm is fairly robust because we ran our experiments with different model versions and under varying conditions. The yearly number we project, however, still remains very low," reassures study co-author Wang. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
April 25, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130425091203.htm | New metric to measure destructive potential of hurricanes | Researchers at Florida State University have developed a new metric to measure seasonal Atlantic tropical cyclone activity that focuses on the size of storms in addition to the duration and intensity, a measure that may prove important when considering a hurricane's potential for death and destruction. | Just ask the survivors of Hurricane Sandy.The 2012 hurricane was only a Category 2 storm on the often referenced Saffir-Simpson scale when it became the largest hurricane on record, killing 285 people in its path in seven different countries and becoming the second costliest in U.S. history. Likewise, Hurricane Katrina was a weaker storm than 1969's Camille but caused much more destruction even though the two hurricanes followed essentially the same path.The new metric, called Track Integrated Kinetic Energy (TIKE), builds on the concept of Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE) developed in 2007 to more accurately measure the destructive potential of a storm. IKE involves using kinetic energy scales with the surface stress that forces storm surge and waves and the horizontal wind loads specified by the American Society of Civil Engineers. TIKE expands the concept by accumulating IKE over the lifespan of a tropical cyclone and over all named tropical cyclones in the hurricane season."Representing the activity of an Atlantic hurricane season by a number is a very difficult task," said Vasu Misra, an associate professor of meteorology in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science and FSU's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS). "TIKE gives a succinct picture by taking into account the number of tropical cyclones in the season, the duration of each tropical cyclone and the time history of the wind force over a large area surrounding each tropical cyclone. This makes TIKE much more reliable as an objective measure of the seasonal activity of the Atlantic hurricanes than existing metrics."Misra developed TIKE through a collaboration with Steven DiNapoli, a former COAPS data analyst, and Mark Powell, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration atmospheric scientist currently stationed at COAPS who created IKE with a colleague six years ago. Their paper, "The Track Integrated Kinetic Energy of the Atlantic Tropical Cyclones," was published in the American Meteorological Society's Misra, DiNapoli and Powell calculated TIKE for each hurricane season, including all named tropical cyclones in the Atlantic from 1990 through 2011, and found larger TIKE values during La Niña conditions and warm tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature conditions. The information will help them in developing a model that can predict TIKE for an entire season -- a prediction that could help emergency managers, businesses and residents with preparedness."I look forward to the global climate models improving enough to allow skillful predictions of storm size, which will help us predict TIKE for an upcoming season," Powell said. TIKE is not intended as an alternative to existing metrics but as a complimentary tool, the researchers said.The need for more information about the potential for destruction was brought home during the 2012 season. The Integrated Kinetic Energy calculation that TIKE is based on was more than 300 terajoules for Hurricane Sandy. The figure, which represents units of energy, was the largest IKE measurement for any hurricane between 1990 and 2006."That means that Sandy actually had more wind forcing over a large area than Hurricane Katrina," Misra said. "If the public was aware that this number was so high, which is an indication of the large potential for damage from storm surge and waves, some of them might have been able to make better life- and property-saving decisions." This research was supported by grants from NOAA, the Southeast Ecological Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
April 18, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130418213919.htm | Superstorm Sandy shook the U.S., literally | When superstorm Sandy turned and took aim at New York City and Long Island last October, ocean waves hitting each other and the shore rattled the seafloor and much of the United States -- shaking detected by seismometers across the country, University of Utah researchers found. | "We detected seismic waves created by the oceans waves both hitting the East Coast and smashing into each other," with the most intense seismic activity recorded when Sandy turned toward Long Island, New York and New Jersey, says Keith Koper, director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations."We were able to track the hurricane by looking at the 'microseisms' [relatively small seismic waves] generated by Sandy," says Oner Sufri, a University of Utah geology and geophysics doctoral student and first author of the study with Koper. "As the storm turned west-northwest, the seismometers lit up."Sufri was scheduled to present the preliminary, unpublished findings in Salt Lake City Thursday, April 18 during the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting.There is no magnitude scale for the microseisms generated by Sandy, but Koper says they range from roughly 2 to 3 on a quake magnitude scale. The conversion is difficult because earthquakes pack a quick punch, while storms unleash their energy for many hours.The shaking was caused partly by waves hitting the East Coast, but much more by waves colliding with other waves in the ocean, setting up "standing waves" that reach the seafloor and transmit energy to it, Sufri and Koper say.While many people may not realize it, earthquakes are not the only events that generate seismic waves. So do mining and mine collapses; storm winds, waves and tornadoes; traffic, construction and other urban activities; and meteors hitting Earth."They are not earthquakes; they are seismic waves," says Koper, a seismologist and associate professor of geology and geophysics. "Seismic waves can be created by a range of causes. … We have beautiful seismic records of the meteor that hit Russia. That's not an earthquake, but it created ground motion."While Sandy's seismicity may be news to many, Koper says microseisms just as strong were detected before and after the superstorm from North Pacific and North Atlantic storms that never hit land but created "serious ocean wave action."Koper adds: "Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was recorded by a seismic array in California, and they could track the path of the storm remotely using seismometers."In a related study set for presentation on Friday at the seismology meeting, Koper and geophysics undergraduate student YeouHui Wong found preliminary evidence that seismometers near Utah's Great Salt Lake are picking up seismic waves generated either by waves or winds on the lake.Koper says researchers wonder if microseisms from storms and other causes might trigger tiny but real earthquakes, but "that hasn't been investigated yet," he says.The microseisms generated by Sandy were detected by Earthscope, a National Science Foundation-funded array of about 500 portable seismometers that were first placed in California in 2004 and have been leapfrogging eastward so that most now are located east of line running from Minnesota to east Texas, and west of a line from Lake Erie to Florida. Some remain scattered across the Midwest and West, with a heavier concentration in the Pacific Northwest.Earthscope's purpose is to use seismic waves from quakes and other sources to make images of Earth's crust and upper mantle beneath North America -- similar to how X-rays are used to make CT scans of the human body. To do it accurately, scientists must understand all sources of seismic waves.Sufri says the new study included Earthscope data from Oct. 18 to Nov. 3, 2012, "which coincides with the passage of Hurricane Sandy, and we tried to understand microseisms that were generated."Sandy caused a damaging storm surge due to its size -- almost 1,100 miles in diameter for tropical-storm-force winds -- more than its intensity, which was 3 when it hit Cuba and 2 off the Northeast coast."The energy generated by Sandy is going to be used to image the crust and upper mantle under North America," says Koper, noting that Earthscope uses years of seismic data to construct images. "We are using seismic waves created by ocean waves to make images of the continent."Normal ocean waves "decay with depth very quickly," says Koper. But when Sandy turned, there was a sudden increase in waves hitting waves to create "standing waves" like those created when you throw two pebbles in a pond and the ripples intersect. "Pressure generated by standing waves remains significant at the seafloor," he says."When Sandy made that turn to the northwest, although wind speeds didn't get dramatically bigger, the seismic energy that was created got tremendously bigger because the ocean's standing waves were larger from the wave-wave interaction," he adds.Not only did the seismic waves become more energetic, "but the periods got longer so, in a sense, the sound of those seismic waves got deeper -- less treble, more bass -- as the storm turned," Koper says.Seismologists can track Sandy and other big storms because seismometers detect three components of motion: one vertical and two horizontal. If most of the energy on a seismometer is detected with a north-south motion, it means the source of the energy is north or south of the device."If you have enough seismometers, you can get enough data to get arrows to point at the source," Koper says.He says the seismologists didn't track Sandy in real time, but the seismographic data of the storm suggests it might be possible to help track storms in the future using their seismicity.Sufri speculates that seismic tracking of storms might allow observations that satellites can miss, and perhaps could help researchers "understand how climate is changing and how it is affecting our oceans -- are we seeing more intense storms and increasing numbers of storms?"Koper says the Sandy study "is exploratory science where we are trying to learn fundamental things about how the atmosphere, oceans and solid Earth interact." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
March 18, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130318151519.htm | Ten times more hurricane surges in future, new research predicts | By examining the frequency of extreme storm surges in the past, previous research has shown that there was an increasing tendency for storm hurricane surges when the climate was warmer. But how much worse will it get as temperatures rise in the future? How many extreme storm surges like that from Hurricane Katrina, which hit the U.S. coast in 2005, will there be as a result of global warming? New research from the Niels Bohr Institute show that there will be a tenfold increase in frequency if the climate becomes two degrees Celsius warmer. | The results are published in the scientific journal, Tropical cyclones arise over warm ocean surfaces with strong evaporation and warming of the air. The typically form in the Atlantic Ocean and move towards the U.S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. If you want to try to calculate the frequency of tropical cyclones in a future with a warmer global climate, researchers have developed various models. One is based on the regional sea temperatures, while another is based on differences between the regional sea temperatures and the average temperatures in the tropical oceans. There is considerable disagreement among researchers about which is best."Instead of choosing between the two methods, I have chosen to use temperatures from all around the world and combine them into a single model," explains climate scientist Aslak Grinsted, Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.He takes into account the individual statistical models and weights them according to how good they are at explaining past storm surges. In this way, he sees that the model reflects the known physical relationships, for example, how the El Niño phenomenon affects the formation of cyclones. The research was performed in collaboration with colleagues from China and England.The statistical models are used to predict the number of hurricane surges 100 years into the future. How much worse will it be per degree of global warming? How many 'Katrinas' will there be per decade?Since 1923, there has been a 'Katrina' magnitude storm surge every 20 years."We find that 0.4 degrees Celcius warming of the climate corresponds to a doubling of the frequency of extreme storm surges like the one following Hurricane Katrina. With the global warming we have had during the 20th century, we have already crossed the threshold where more than half of all 'Katrinas' are due to global warming," explains Aslak Grinsted."If the temperature rises an additional degree, the frequency will increase by 3-4 times and if the global climate becomes two degrees warmer, there will be about 10 times as many extreme storm surges. This means that there will be a 'Katrina' magnitude storm surge every other year," says Aslak Grinsted and he points out that in addition to there being more extreme storm surges, the sea will also rise due to global warming. As a result, the storm surges will become worse and potentially more destructive. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
March 7, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130307124414.htm | Changes in heart attack timing continue years after Hurricane Katrina | The upheaval caused by Hurricane Katrina seems to have disrupted the usual timing of heart attacks, shifting peak frequency from weekday mornings to weekend nights, in a change in pattern that persisted a full five years after the storm, according to research being presented at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. | The study, which could inform decisions about hospital staffing after natural disasters, compared the timing of heart attacks in patients admitted to Tulane Medical Center six years before and five years after the storm hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, devastating New Orleans with floods and killing more than 1,800 people. The latest analysis expands on the previously published research that looked at these trends in the three years post-Katrina. The new data show that even five years after the hurricane, heart attacks were still less likely to occur in the mornings or on weekdays and were instead more frequent at night and on the weekends -- a major shift from what cardiologists and hospitals normally see. Researchers point to prolonged periods of stress as the most likely cause."The stress and devastation brought on by Katrina doesn't just make a heart attack more likely, but it also can alter when they occur," said Matthew Peters, MD, a second year internal medicine resident at Tulane University School of Medicine and the study's lead investigator. "It may even outweigh or augment some of the physiological mechanisms [behind heart attacks]."Heart attacks tend to be more common in the morning and on weekdays, especially Mondays, because of surges in the body's stress (cortisol) and "fight-or-flight" (catecholamines) hormones, higher than normal blood pressure and heart rate, and a dip in the body's ability to break up blood clots. But the shifts in behaviors and routines seen after the storm may have trumped some of these factors, Dr. Peters said.Still, researchers did find a potentially encouraging sign from this latest analysis -- a slight return of Monday morning heart attacks in a pattern closer to pre-storm events. Before the hurricane, 23 percent of heart attacks occurred on Mondays. This dropped to 10 percent in the three years after the storm and only recently crept up to 16.5 percent, though it is not a statistically significant change."It suggests some normalization in employment and work patterns, but generally things still appear to be pretty much in disarray," Dr. Peters said.He speculates that with so many people forced out of work after Katrina, weekday mornings and Mondays, in particular, became less stressful. In the last two years, the unemployment rate in New Orleans has dropped slightly -- from 17.9 to 15.2 percent; however, it is still twice the pre-storm unemployment rate of 7 percent. Night and weekend heart attacks may be more likely because day-to-day life at home became more anxiety-ridden with temporary housing, rebuilding homes and financial stressors.Researchers looked at heart attack trends in a total of 1,044 confirmed heart attack cases; 299 before Katrina, 408 in the three years after Katrina and another 337 in the four and five years after the storm.Compared to the pre-Katrina group, morning and weekday heart attacks continued to be a significantly smaller portion of total heart attacks in years four and five after the storm (45.2 vs. 30.5 percent and 60.2 vs. 36.3 percent, respectively). Heart attacks occurring over the weekend were nearly twice as likely as before the storm hit (30.6 vs. 16.1 percent of all heart attacks) and night heart attacks remained significantly elevated as well (43.6 vs. 29.8 percent). Compared to the one to three years after the storm, years four and five showed non-significant decreases in morning, weekday and weekend heart attacks and a substantial (but non-significant) reduction in heart attacks at night.Patients in the post-Katrina group were more likely to be smokers (52.3 vs. 34.4 percent) and lack health insurance (17.1 vs. 8.4 percent) compared to those before the storm. No significant differences were noted between groups in terms of age, sex, ethnicity, medical comorbidities, medications or substance abuse. Excluded from the study were non-New Orleans residents, hospital transfers, patients with symptom onset while hospitalized and patients without adequate documentation of timing of symptom onset.Dr. Peters says this research may affect hospitals and health care workers in areas hard-hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters as they tend to be understaffed at night or on the weekends because, under normal circumstances, fewer patients come in. However, based on these findings, after a disaster the opposite might be true. He says this could affect patient outcomes as well because patients who are treated at night generally have higher failure rates for angioplasty, longer door-to-balloon times and higher rates of in-hospital mortality, he adds."With the increased incidence of major disasters in the U.S. and worldwide, it is important to understand how these disasters affect the heart because clearly they do," Dr. Peters said.Dr. Peters and his team, led by Anand Irimpen, MD, associate professor of medicine at the Heart and Vascular Institute of Tulane University School of Medicine and chief of cardiology at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System, are planning to collaborate with medical centers in other regions hard-hit by hurricanes or other natural disasters to collect more data on these trends. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
March 7, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130307124237.htm | Higher heart attack rates continue 6 years after Katrina | New Orleans residents continue to face a three-fold increased risk of heart attack post-Katrina -- a trend that has remained unchanged since the storm hit in 2005, according to research being presented at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. | The new data -- an update to previous analyses comparing the behavioral and heart health of people before and after the storm -- show this heightened risk persists even though post-Katrina patients are more likely to be prescribed medications known to prevent heart attacks such as aspirin, beta blockers, statins and ACE inhibitors. Compared to the pre-Katrina group, those experiencing a heart attack after the storm were less likely to comply with these therapies or have health insurance. They were also more likely to smoke, overuse alcohol or other substances, and be burdened with high levels of stress and mental illness."Overwhelmingly, the main differences in the pre- and post-Katrina populations involve psychosocial risk factors as opposed to shifts in traditional cardiovascular risk factors like hypertension, obesity and diabetes," said Anand Irimpen, MD, the study's senior investigator, associate professor of medicine at the Heart and Vascular Institute of Tulane University School of Medicine and chief of cardiology at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System. "These findings have broad implications about how natural disasters affect communities, as well as the extensive costs to society, whether it is financial or social."Dr. Irimpen said the evidence supports an association between pervasive levels of chronic stress and heart health and underscores the need for clinicians to proactively assess their patients' anxiety levels, especially in the aftermath of such a traumatic event. Previous studies indicate stress reduction and cognitive behavioral therapy, in particular, may reduce the occurrence of heart attacks.This study evaluated patients admitted with heart attacks to Tulane Medical Center in the two years before Katrina and the six years after the hospital reopened, which was five months after Katrina. Researchers examined differences in the incidence of heart attacks and compared the two groups based on specific demographic and clinical data, including lab test results, health insurance status, first-time hospitalization, medical non-adherence, smoking status, substance abuse and employment. In the post-Katrina group, there were 1,177 confirmed admissions for heart attack representing 2.4 percent of the total patient census of 48,258 compared to 150 admissions representing 0.7 percent of the patient census of 21,079 in the two-year pre-Katrina group (p<0.0001).The groups were comparable in terms of age, sex, ethnicity and hypertension. However, the post-Katrina group had a higher prevalence of prior coronary artery bypass grafts, hyperlipidemia, psychiatric comorbidities like depression and anxiety disorder, as well as smoking and substance abuse. This group was also more likely to be unemployed, uninsured and reside in New Orleans. While there seems to be a higher proportion of people with coronary artery disease post-Katrina, Dr. Irimpen says this increase may be secondary to the surge in heart attacks. The prevalence of known coronary artery disease among these patients was 42, 48 and 53 percent at two, four and six years after the storm, respectively. It was 30.7 percent pre-Katrina, suggesting that people may not be adequately controlling cardiovascular risk factors."Large-scale catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina seem to create a very large shift in the population and the way it behaves and takes care of itself," he said. "While there is a lot we can do with medications and medical interventions, those therapies become less effective based on the way the patient takes care of him or herself."This stark reality has prompted these researchers to recommend that officials in New Orleans and other areas hard-hit by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes or tsunamis, identify and integrate strategies that consider psychological and cardiovascular health into disaster planning. As much as the Gulf Coast has been rebuilt in the last six years, there are still lingering signs of destruction, which have an ongoing effect on heart health."The massive devastation of Hurricane Katrina has broken the infrastructure of New Orleans, and its effects are much more far-reaching than we expected," Dr. Irimpen said, adding that ongoing implementation of lifestyle changes to help accommodate for unforeseen circumstances is imperative for maintaining heart health.As more data is amassed, he and his research team plan to collaborate with other centers to collect and compare data from sites around the U.S. that have experienced major natural disasters, including those in the New York area following Hurricane Sandy. The hope is that this research will eventually allow the team to create a risk prediction tool that may lead to better triage of patients who are susceptible to post-disaster heart attacks. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
March 5, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130305145133.htm | More storms like Sandy? Arctic ice loss amplified Superstorm Sandy violence | If you believe that last October's Superstorm Sandy was a freak of nature -- the confluence of unusual meteorological, atmospheric and celestial events -- think again. | Cornell and Rutgers researchers report in the March issue of The article, "Superstorm Sandy: A Series of Unfortunate Events?" was authored by Charles H. Greene, Cornell professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and director of Cornell's Ocean Resources and Ecosystems program; Jennifer A. Francis of Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences; and Bruce C. Monger, Cornell senior research associate, earth and atmospheric sciences.The researchers assert that the record-breaking sea ice loss from summer 2012, combined with the unusual atmospheric phenomena observed in late October, appear to be linked to global warming.A strong atmospheric, high-pressure blocking pattern over Greenland and the northwest Atlantic prevented Hurricane Sandy from steering northeast and out to sea like most October hurricanes and tropical storms from the Caribbean. In fact, Sandy traveled up the Atlantic coast and turned left "toward the most populated area along the eastern seaboard" and converged with an extratropical cyclone; this, in turn, fed the weakening Hurricane Sandy and transformed it into a monster tempest.Superstorm Sandy's extremely low atmospheric pressure and the strong high-pressure block to the north created violent east winds that pushed storm surge against the eastern seaboard. "To literally top it off, the storm surge combined with full-moon high tides and huge ocean waves to produce record high water levels that exceeded the worst-case predictions for parts of New York City," write the researchers.Greene, Francis and Monger add: "If one accepts this evidence and . . . takes into account the record loss of Arctic sea ice this past September, then perhaps the likelihood of greenhouse warming playing a significant role in Sandy's evolution as an extratropical superstorm is at least as plausible as the idea that this storm was simply a freak of nature." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
February 25, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130225185919.htm | Restoration planned for shoreline protecting NASA's Kennedy Space Center infrastructure | Late last October, one of the most destructive storms ever to hit the United States bashed the beaches of Brevard County in Florida, including the shoreline of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Scientists are assessing damage along a 1.2 mile stretch of shoreline near Launch Pads 39A and B and developing restoration plans. | Hurricane Sandy damaged portions of the Caribbean and had serious impacts along the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states before delivering a devastating blow to the Northeast.Constant pounding from hurricanes, such as Sandy, other weather systems and higher than usual tides, have destroyed sand dunes protecting the infrastructure at the spaceport."The shoreline continues to move farther inland threatening critical portions of our infrastructure," said Don Dankert, a biological scientist in the NASA Environmental Management Branch of Center Operations. "The ocean is now less than a quarter of a mile from Launch Pads A and B. The ground under the railroad lines has been breached, and the line of erosion has moved dangerously close to the beach road. Additionally, we need to protect underground utilities near the beach road."Originally built in the 1960s for the Apollo Saturn V rockets that sent astronauts to the moon, the launch pads were modified in the late 1970s to support the Space Shuttle Program. Pad B is now being updated to support NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System launch vehicle and Orion capsule. Pad A may be used in the future for commercial rockets."The pads are crucial to our future, and we've got to make sure we do all we can to protect them," Dankert said.It doesn't take a direct hit from a hurricane to cause severe erosion on the beaches."When Sandy moved north past Florida, it was 220 miles offshore, but its effects were far-reaching," Dankert said. "The ocean pounds the beaches with higher tides and strong winds that rip away at the dunes, moving the shoreline farther inland."Dankert explained that Sandy was only the most recent blow to beaches along the Space Coast."During Kennedy's history, tropical weather has continued to batter our shoreline," he said. "Some pass by, and with some we've had a few direct hits. It's a constant battle to restore the dunes that hold off the weather-induced erosion."Experts such as Dankert are busy developing a long-term plan to mitigate the constant battering from the environment. They hope to use some of the $15 million included for NASA in the multi-billion-dollar Hurricane Sandy relief bill passed by Congress."Part of these funds will go to the NASA facility on Wallops Island on the coast of Virginia since they had a lot of damage too," he said. "Hopefully, we will be able to use some of that money to rebuild the sand dunes here."Kennedy officials are hoping to bring in sand to replace the protective sand dunes on the beach that can serve as a buffer from tropical cyclones."A Dune Vulnerability Team was formed in 2009 to assess the condition of our shoreline and develop a strategy to provide long-term protection," Dankert said. "The DVT is a joint effort with NASA, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Florida. In addition to rebuilding the dunes, we needed to plant native vegetation on newly created dunes to provide soil stabilization and benefits to native wildlife."Following a number of hurricanes and tropical storms dating back to 2004, repairs to the primary dunes along Kennedy's beaches was required. A 15-foot-high, 725-foot long secondary dune was completed in 2010 along the widest expanse between pads A and B. The new dune was the only stretch remaining intact after Hurricane Sandy."After rebuilding the dunes, we may remove the rail since it hasn't been used in years," Dankert said, "so we can protect the beach road and the launch pads which are crucial to Kennedy's future."The space center's shoreline also is an important habitat for wildlife, including several endangered species. "Losing portions of the Kennedy shoreline may have negative effects for species such as the Southeastern beach mouse, indigo snakes and gopher tortoises," Dankert said. "Restoring the dunes will also help us protect these species."Dankert noted that the re-built dunes also would block launch pad lighting on the beach, thus aiding nesting and hatchling sea turtles find their way to and from the ocean."The newly hatched sea turtles are disoriented by artificial light," he said. "We want to encourage them to head toward the sea."According to Dankert, the funding to begin restoring the beach dunes comes at a crucial time for the Florida spaceport."Our beaches have been slowly eroding for years and the sooner we get started, the better," he said. "This will, at least, get us going." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
January 31, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130131120642.htm | The big picture: Getting a better look at Sandy's wake of destruction | Images of the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy have captured the immense power of what many experts have termed a "superstorm." These snapshots and videos might not tell the whole story, however. A group of Drexel University engineers are now trying to give rescue and recovery workers a better picture of the storm's damages that can't be seen by the naked eye. | Using a combination of images from satellites and remote controlled aircrafts and cameras equipped with infrared and ultraviolet technology, the researchers are hoping to paint a detailed picture of Sandy's path of destruction that could help emergency workers respond to the next natural disaster."During Hurricane Sandy, 7.5 million power outages were reported and thousands of people were still without power weeks after the hurricane," said Dr. Anu Pradhan an assistant professor in Drexel's College of Engineering and the lead researcher on the National Science Foundation-funded research team. "This is due to the massive destruction, it's difficult to see the full scope of it by walking through the sites, we need a broader picture that shows the various layers of damage both seen and unseen."Infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) imaging technology, combined with acoustic emission (AE) testing can reveal damages to power lines, trees, telephone poles and buildings that appeared to be unscathed."Infrared and ultraviolet cameras can capture radiation that is not visible to the naked eye," said Dr. Ivan Bartoli, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering and a co-researcher for the project. "Different anomalies in power lines can be observed using IR/UV imaging, in the future, using a combination of high resolution satellite images and close-range aerial photography with IR/UV filters, we could determine which power lines are working and which are damaged."Acoustic emission testing uses sound waves to test the elasticity of trees and telephone poles and can determine whether or not they've been damaged internally to the point where they could be a falling hazard.The team already has infrared, ultraviolet and acoustic emission testing equipment at its disposal and has made several visits to storm-damaged areas in New Jersey to take pictures and gather data. It is also in the process of attaching it to a remote controlled aircraft for low-altitude data collection. In addition, the engineers will make a system to display the data on an aerial map of the area and algorithm to help emergency responders triage their recovery efforts."In addition to the lives lost and destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy, the residual effects are still very much with us," said co-researcher Dr. Antonios Kontsos, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering. "Our goal is to make sure that responders have even more information at their disposal the next time something like this happens so that perhaps some of this loss can be prevented." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
January 29, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130129080220.htm | Satellite visualization tool for high-resolution observation review (thor) accessible from any location with internet access | A paper published in the February issue of | Initially only operable from a desktop computer, with the approach outlined in the study, THOR is now accessible online from NASA's Precipitation Processing System website. This allows researchers to remotely examine the 15-year archive of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite data. Efforts to improve THOR have been on-going since the 1997 launch of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, which carries first space-borne radar capable of observing detailed three-dimensional structure of regions of precipitation inside of storm clouds."The 3D display technique can be used to make features of, for example, a hurricane, visually accessible even to those without technical training in meteorology," explained Owen Kelley, author of the study. "The TRMM satellite observed Hurricane Sandy a day before its U.S. landfall affecting New Jersey and New York, among other states. Using this technique, TRMM 3D images of the storm's overflight and other tropical cyclones during the final months of 2012 could be made available through NASA Hurricane Resource Page.""Addressing an important problem at intersection of the geosciences (remote sensing, hydrology, meteorology) and computer sciences, this article is a poster child example of what we aim to publish in Computers & Geosciences," explains Jef Caers Co-Editor-in-Chief of Computers & Geosciences. "It uses modern computer science paradigms such as the World Wide Web, code re-use and practical graphical user interfaces to address an important geoscience problem."The approach outlined in the paper may be of interest to other organizations responsible for earth-observing satellites that have custom desktop visualization tools which may need to be converted to online applications for broader usage, or that have 3D datasets that require the development of an interactive visualization tool. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
January 28, 2013 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130128151921.htm | Shedding light on role of Amazon forests in global carbon cycle | Earth's forests perform a well-known service to the planet, absorbing a great deal of the carbon dioxide pollution emitted into the atmosphere from human activities. But when trees are killed by natural disturbances, such as fire, drought or wind, their decay also releases carbon back into the atmosphere, making it critical to quantify tree mortality in order to understand the role of forests in the global climate system. Tropical old-growth forests may play a large role in this absorption service, yet tree mortality patterns for these forests are not well understood. | Now scientist Jeffrey Chambers and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have devised an analytical method that combines satellite images, simulation modeling and painstaking fieldwork to help researchers detect forest mortality patterns and trends. This new tool will enhance understanding of the role of forests in carbon sequestration and the impact of climate change on such disturbances."One quarter of COChambers, in close collaboration with Robinson Negron-Juarez at Tulane University, Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia [INPA]) and other colleagues, studied a section of the Central Amazon spanning over a thousand square miles near Manaus, Brazil. By linking data from Landsat satellite images over a 20-year period with observations on the ground, they found that 9.1 to 16.9 percent of tree mortality was missing from more conventional plot-based analyses of forests. That equates to more than half a million dead trees each year that had previously been unaccounted for in studies of this region, and which need to be included in forest carbon budgets.Their findings were published online this week in the "If these results hold for most tropical forests, then it would indicate that because we missed some of the mortality, then the contribution of these forests to the net sink might be less than previous studies have suggested," Chambers said. "An old-growth forest has a mosaic of patches all doing different things. So if you want to understand the average behavior of that system you need to sample at a much larger spatial scale over larger time intervals than was previously appreciated. You don't see this mosaic if you walk through the forest or study only one patch. You really need to look at the forest at the landscape scale."Trees and other living organisms are key players in the global carbon cycle, a complex biogeochemical process in which carbon is exchanged among the atmosphere, the ocean, the biosphere and Earth's crust. Fewer trees mean not only a weakening of the forest's ability to absorb carbon, but the decay of dead trees will also release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Large-scale tree mortality in tropical ecosystems could thus act as a positive feedback mechanism, accelerating the global warming effect.The Amazon forest is hit periodically by fierce thunderstorms that may bring violent winds with concentrated bursts believed to be as high as 170 miles per hour. The storms can blow down many acres of the forest; however, Chambers and his team were able to paint a much more nuanced picture of how storms affected the forest.By looking at satellite images before and after a storm, the scientists discerned changes in the reflectivity of the forest, which they assumed was due to damage to the canopy and thus tree loss. Researchers were then sent into the field at some of the blowdown areas to count the number of trees felled by the storm. Looking at the satellite images pixel by pixel (with each pixel representing 900 square meters, or about one-tenth of a football field) and matching them with on-the-ground observations, they were able to draw a detailed mortality map for the entire landscape, which had never been done before.Essentially they found that tree mortality is clustered in both time and space. "It's not blowdown or no blowdown -- it's a gradient, with everything in between," he said. "Some areas have 80 percent of trees down, some have 15 percent."In one particularly violent storm in 2005, a squall line more than 1,000 miles long and 150 miles wide crossed the entire Amazon basin. The researchers estimated that hundreds of millions of trees were potentially destroyed, equivalent to a significant fraction of the estimated mean annual carbon accumulation for the Amazon forest. This finding was published in 2010 in As climatic warming is expected to bring more intense droughts and stronger storms, understanding their effect on tropical and forest ecosystems becomes ever more important. "We need to establish a baseline so we can say how these forests functioned before we changed the climate," Chambers said.This new tool can be used to assess tree mortality in other types of forests as well. Chambers and colleagues reported in the journal Disturbances such as Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina cause large impacts to the terrestrial carbon cycle, forest tree mortality and COBesides understanding how forests affect carbon cycling, the new technique could also play a vital role in understanding how climate change will affect forests. Although the atmospheric CO"But these climate change signals will start popping out of the noise faster and faster as the years go on," Chambers said. "So, what's going to happen to old-growth tropical forests? On one hand they are being fertilized by some unknown extent by the rising COChambers' co-authors on the This study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,013 |
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