NOAA Hurricane Hunters are flying back-to-back missions to study the newly developed Tropical Storm Hermine in the Gulf of Mexico, capturing its evolution from a cluster of thunderstorms into a tropical storm. Getting data during such transitions can help improve hurricane models which currently don’t predict transitions well. Our understanding of the physical processes of early storm development remains limited, largely because there are few observations.
For the first time, NOAA’s National Weather Service National Hurricane Center used real-time weather data from the NASA Global Hawk unmanned aircraft to upgrade a tropical storm to a hurricane in the early morning hours Thursday. While the Hurricane Center recently downgraded Gaston back to a tropical storm, the recent forecast also notes it could intensify again on Saturday.
The NASA Global Hawk unmanned aircraft touched down Friday morning at NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast where NOAA and NASA scientists are preparing it for flights over Atlantic hurricanes.
While advances in meteorology fuel continual improvements to weather forecasts, there is growing awareness that a precise, timely forecast isn’t enough to prevent loss of lives and property. We must also deliver weather information to the public in ways that motivate people to take action to prevent loss of life and property.
We sat down recently with Kim Klockow, Ph.D., visiting scientist at NOAA Research’s Office of Weather and Air Quality, to learn about her work bringing together the study of meteorology and human behavior to help the public better use weather information to save lives and property.
The Big Thompson flood of 1976 was one of three major flash floods during the span of five years in the 1970s that killed more than 450 people across the country -- tragic events that helped spur the modernization of NOAA’s National Weather Service flood forecasting system.
Meet Shian-Jiann Lin, Ph.D., the leader of the team at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory that created the new dynamic core that NOAA announced this week will be used to develop a state-of-the-art global weather forecasting model over the next three years.
Residents, communities and businesses now have easy access to climate projections, through a few easy keystrokes, for every county in the contiguous United States.
At first glance they might be mistaken for toys, but these remote-controlled devices aren’t for play. Unmanned aircraft and watercraft are being put to work by NOAA scientists to gather astonishing new data from our wildlands and waterways.
The journal Nature Geoscience published a paper by Tom Delworth and his colleagues examining how a natural atmospheric force--the North Atlantic Oscillation--may be changing ocean currents in the North Atlantic. Among other impacts, the stronger ocean currents increase the amount of heat flowing toward polar areas, which could speed up Arctic ice melt and affect how hurricanes form. We asked Delworth a few questions about his study: