Gulf Coast and Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to strong winds and heavy rains a full day before tropical storms Bret and Cindy were officially named. The hurricane center issued its first advisories for potential tropical cyclones in June, alerting the U.S. “I find this surprising because there’s still so many bad forecasts out there - ours included - yet we see it over and over: people don’t have a good grasp on just what the forecast uncertainties still are,” he said. Despite a variety of warnings and advisories highlighting specific storm hazards, such as storm surge flooding, some people still expect hurricanes to stick to a predicted track, even though forecasts include a range of potential outcomes. Improved forecasts, however, can be a double-edged sword, Franklin said.
2008 HURRICANE TRACK DRIVER
How much heat is going to get extracted from that ocean? That’s a big driver for intensification.” You’re talking about the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere. “But when it comes to intensity, what’s going to make a tropical depression strengthen into a hurricane - now you’re talking about all kinds of things going on in the atmosphere on very small scales. “We’ve always been able to see many or most of the steering factors or steering features in the atmosphere, and we get better at it all the time,” he said. However, forecasting intensity has been more difficult because it depends on the interactions between the ocean and thunderstorms at the core of a tropical storm, and those interactions happen in an area just tens of miles (kilometers) wide and are difficult to observe even with advanced dropsondes, drones and satellites, Franklin said. For example, a high-pressure area over the Atlantic known as the Bermuda High, which can nudge storms toward land instead of over open waters, is hundreds of miles (kilometers) across. Hurricane track forecasts have steadily improved partly because the weather elements that direct a storm’s path are easy to see, Franklin said. He also helped develop new GPS dropsondes that showed how eyewall winds vary.īefore his June 30 retirement, ending a 35-year NOAA career that included 83 flights breaching hurricane eyewalls, Franklin discussed forecasting with The Associated Press:
His research with dropsondes - sensor-filled tubes that send weather data as they fall through hurricanes - helped improve forecasts of storm tracks and led NOAA to buy a “hurricane hunter” jet that’s still used today. “It’s hanging on really by a thread in terms of funding,” said James Franklin, who oversees the National Hurricane Center team that releases tropical storm forecasts and warnings.ĭuring his time at NOAA, Franklin was on research teams that made breakthroughs in tropical storm forecasting and in the understanding of the winds circling a hurricane’s eye. Funding has shrunk to less than half that, and President Donald Trump’s proposed budget includes further cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program in 2009 with a $13 million budget.
Recent progress in forecasting the intensity of hurricanes - which has lagged behind storm track forecasting - could be undermined by proposed cuts in federal funding for tropical weather research, says the retiring chief of a team of U.S. Hurricane Ike as seen in 2008 from NASA's Earth Observatory
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