The sultry summer months along the Gulf Coast and East Coast are a time of volatile weather as warm ocean water fuels storms, some just bringing rain and some growing into fierce tropical storms and hurricanes.
The sultry summer months along the Gulf Coast and East Coast are a time of volatile weather as warm ocean water fuels storms, some just bringing rain and some growing into fierce tropical storms and hurricanes. The World Meteorological Organization rotates an alphabetical naming system every year to simplify references to tropical storms and hurricanes, but selecting a name is perhaps the simplest task surrounding them, while the more complex challenge lies in predicting where they will go.
The oftentimes destructive nature of tropical storms and hurricanes makes it paramount for the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) to accurately predict the track, intensity, and size of tropical storms and hurricanes, and provide information related to various hazards, such as storm surge, wind, and heavy rainfall. NHC forecasters rely on numerical weather prediction models run on advanced supercomputers to develop their forecasts.
Dr. Louis Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service, explains that “numerical modeling itself - the introduction of those models, the continued improvements, the ability to run them in real time - has fundamentally revolutionized weather forecasting and has allowed us to make accurate hurricane forecasts up to five days in advance.”
Continue reading at NOAA.
Image via NOAA.
