NASA Preparing For Largest Hurricane Study Ever

anonymous writes "Does lightning predict the intensity of a tropical storm? What role does dust from the Sahara play? Do hurricanes form from the large-scale environment around a tropical storm or from small-scale formations 100 kilometers from the center? A team from NASA, NOAA, and NSF plan to find out. Starting Saturday, the team will conduct the largest hurricane study every undertaken. Among other things, a better understanding of hurricanes has ramifications for weather prediction, building codes, insurance policies, and disaster planning." One recent study found that hurricane creation is affected by plankton in the ocean.

Comments

Awesome!

[locallyunscene]

They should make a documentary about it. This could be the kind of thing that will pay off for years to come, despite a large up front expense.

Re:Awesome!

[Rei]

Of the many hundreds of claims about global warming made in An Inconvenient Truth, the overwhelming majority reflected the current consensus views of the scientific community. But the link between global warming and hurricanes -- the one that they focused so strongly on that they put it on the cover -- does not.

In the US, for example, we're mainly concerned about Atlantic basin hurricanes. Look at this season -- record-hot sea surface temperatures covering an unthinkably huge swath of the Atlantic. And it's La Nina which generally keeps down wind shear. So why the merely "average" season so far? Two main reasons. One, the weather patterns have created a long train of upper-level lows, which create extra shear and help entrain dry air into developing systems. And two, there's been unusually high atmospheric instability (read: inversion layers). Both of these things are more common in a warming world (as well as shear in general). The reason for the instability, for example, is because a warming world leads to a greater difference in land temperatures and water temperatures, leading to plumes of hot air over land. When these move over the colder marine layer, you have an inversion layer on your hands. Tropical cyclones are powered by warm, moist air rising. If you have a upper-level layer that wants to descend, you're going to rob the system of energy.

The science of hurricane prediction is still rough, and there is no consensus on just how a warming climate will affect hurricanes. However, there is general acceptance that it will reduce the frequency of system development by reducing the windows of opportunity, but will allow for higher strength and faster-developing systems within those windows.