1 post tagged “hurricane”

I went to the DC AMS meeting last night in Rockville, MD. It was held at the new Rockville Library near the new Rockville town center. They have really built that area up nicely. The new library was pretty impressive and we had a really nice meeting room there. I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a nice meeting spot.

The featured speaker was Bill Proenza who is the new director of the National Hurricane Center in Florida. There were a few key take-aways for me from this presentation that you might find interesting.

- Slightly more than half the US population now lives within 50 miles of the coastline.

- Bill showed a slide showing all of the tracks that hurricanes have taken since they began record keeping and there was not one spot of the east coast that has not been impacted by a hurricane.

- The NWS is getting much better at predicting the paths of hurricanes, but their ability to predict the severity of the hurricanes is not improving. More research is definitely needed in this area, especially given that hurricanes can quickly intensify within a short amount of time.

- Part of the presentation was calling for funding of a project called QuickSCAT which I had not heard of before. Apparently this was an experimental sattelite launched about 8 years ago that quickly became an important data source for forecasters. Since it was experimental, and there has been no good mechanism in place to operationalize such things and get funding, it has been difficult getting funding for this. The estimated cost is around $400M. I am not sure how much this product helps in forecasting intensity of hurricanes, but if it helps at all, it seems this would be a great area of investment.

Predictions are for a busy hurricane season again. Of course, the same thing was said about last year and it turned out to be a pretty normal year. Lets hope for another repeat of 2006.