Frank Marks discusses what it is like to fly into the eye of a hurricane at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science – 28 May 2015

HRD Director Frank Marks gave a presentation “Inside the Eye of the Storm” as part of the Science Up Close Series at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science on Thursday, May 28th.

RESUMEN

Advances in the study and forecasting of hurricanes came about through scientific and technological improvements in our ability to observe different aspects of the storms using aircraft. Aircraft missions into hurricanes provide the basis for understanding hurricane structure and evolution. Technological advances in aircraft, instrumentation, and telecommunications over the last 20 years enables real-time transmission of all of these observations directly to the operational forecasters and into numerical models greatly increasing our ability to forecast hurricanes. Each of these technologies started as tools used by researchers flying into these storms in order to better determine a hurricane’s location, intensity, and structure. In order to increase the pace of forecast improvement NOAA developed the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) in 2008 whose goal is to decrease the error in forecast guidance for track and intensity by 20% in 5 years and 50% in 10 years. In order to achieve such and ambitious goal HFIP is pursuing a strategy to make better use of the aircraft observations to provide better initial analyses of the storm’s structure for the models to start from. 

The presentation (161 Mb) is available on the anonymous ftp site at:

ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/pub/blog/seminars/2015/Feel_the_Force_Marks_20150528.pptx