I grew up in the midwest, and-mostly-got an hour or two warning to grab candles and batteries and a radio and head down to the basement.
But even a few hours would have made a huge difference to victims of massive tsunamis from close earthquakes. There isn't a lot to be done either, so often it's "go to sleep and see what happens in the morning". Imagine if we had even poor 3-4 day forecasts for earthquakes/tsunamis.ĮDIT: Here in Hawaii, tsunamis almost always come from across the ocean, so we have many hours of warning. For practically all of human history, hurricane forecasting was more along the lines of "wake up to a hurricane". Well, keeping things in perspective, even this poor forecast is still extremely impressive and helpful. Global warming is going to steadily tank the property values anywhere southeast of Amarillo, either with sea level and summer temperature increases or just straight up flattening it with an energetic hurricane.Īll of this is singularly unhelpful to the residents of the Sunshine State, who are staring down at the possibility of a major hurricane making landfall somewhere along the peninsula in three to four days. "Fucking miserable" doesn't quite capture the experience. No air conditioning, no hot water, while everyone is working in high heat and ~100% humidity to clean up after the storm. One of the things people might not consider is that hurricane season occurs in a region and time period where daily temperatures in the 90s are the norm. Ivan was something like 5 weeks on its own. I've been within a mile of too many tornadoes to count, and have cumulatively spent the better part of a year without power as a result of hurricanes alone. Extreme weather is a lot less fun when you're at ground zero. The weather finally cools off and I get to look at weird-ass weather models every week. Yasss, hurricane season is my favorite time. We all need help after disaster strikes - it really shouldn’t be a photo opportunity. It’s when these natural disasters hit that I wish politicians would use their public powers for the good of everyone affected, not just those in high population, politically contested regions. I can almost envision the various presidential and senate electioneering photo ops. That said, the one thing that is NOT going to help these people is all the freakin’ politicians - currently in office or otherwise - showing up to make empty promises and false sympathies because Florida is a critical political battleground.Īnd Yes, it’s going to happen. It’s like something g conflicting in our reptilian amygdala vs our frontal coretext that says “But.I’m me - this can’t happen to me. The improved resolution and faster scanning from the satellites’ Advanced Baseline Imager enables higher quantity and quality of wind estimates than previously available.Having lived through two hurricanes now - one a Cat 2 and one a Cat 3 - I remember the should we/shouldn’t we anxiety and worry, and how that just builds to such a crescendo that you know - you know - that checking the forecast path every hour is just not a good thing to do mentally, but yet you can’t stop. Wind estimates from GOES-16 and GOES-17 define the wind flow over and around hurricanes, highlight the center of circulation, indicate the direction the storm will move, and provide valuable information on conditions that can lead to rapid intensification. Satellite wind estimates are determined by tracking clouds and moisture features in successive images. The ability to characterize the wind fields in and around a hurricane is crucial to predicting future storm motion and intensity.
This year, high-resolution wind data from GOES-16 and GOES-17 is included in the model.
The model uses data from satellites, aircraft, and radar. The HWRF computer model is the operational backbone for hurricane track and intensity forecasts by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC). This is the sixth year in a row that a named storm has formed before June. It’s already off to a busy start, with two named storms, Arthur and Bertha, forming prior to the official start of hurricane season. NOAA is predicting an above-normal 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially begins June 1. GOES-16 sees Hurricane Dorian moments before it made landfall over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on September 6, 2019.