NASA's Hurricane Model Resolution Increases Nearly 10-Fold Since Katrina

zdburke writes: Thanks to improvements in satellites and on-the-ground computing power, NASA's ability to model hurricane data has come a long way in the ten years since Katrina devastated New Orleans. Their blog notes, "Today's models have up to ten times the resolution than those during Hurricane Katrina and allow for a more accurate look inside the hurricane. Imagine going from video game figures made of large chunky blocks to detailed human characters that visibly show beads of sweat on their forehead." Gizmodo covered the post too and added some technical details, noting that, "the supercomputer has more than 45,000 processor cores and runs at 1.995 petfalops."

Comments

Pet Falop?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a petfalop? How many pet falops make for a grown-up falop?

Re: Pet Falop?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a five fold reproductive tube

Re:Pet Falop?

[billstewart]

It's only 1.995 pet falops because one of the falops got its tail caught in a closing screen door and lost the tip. Maybe it'll grow back.

Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

A much more accurate look at that thing we can't predict the path or intensity of!

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Fragnet]

They didn't say they accuracy of their predictions had increased 10-fold. Only that their computing power has. Unless the accuracy of the input data has increased, all we know for sure is that their electricity bill is going to be higher.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurricane forecast accuracy has bee steadily improving over the years, and now can include forecasts out much further in time than before.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

A much more accurate look at that thing we can't predict the path or intensity of!

Why is every post in this thread either about "petfalops" or saying that the research is pointless? Getting a more accurate look at what happens in these extreme weather events will allow them to be modeled more accurately, which will lead to better predictions about pathing and intensity. We could speculate that it may even allow modeling at some point in the future to advance to the capability for selective seeding of portions of a weather system by airplane to disrupt key areas and mitigate against the most severe parts of the storm. But even if that is just sci-fi fantasy, I don't see the point of all this rage against basic science on a site that purports to be a new aggregator for nerds.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's been estimated that if you had temperature, pressure, and humidity readings for every cubic foot of atmosphere, you could only predict weather to about a month...if you had the computer power, which you wouldn't.

That's the problem with the famous butterfly effect. The tiniest deviation of a single molecule changes the weather patterns months down the road. The microscopic movements dictate large scale events down the road. The error scientists made was assuming small changes dissolved into statistical irrelevance, and that statistics of large masses of air drove particular day-to-day weather patterns. They drive climate, not weather (though particularly severe weather events can shift climate to other strange attractor basins, too. A bad volcano or two and a summer where snow doesn't clear and an ice age can come on in a year or two.)

Weather is the pattern of glitter on the water, not a statistical analysis of the pattern.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, a single molecule still doesn't change crap. One big motion still has more energy than one small motion. But a lot of small motions can affect the big stuff as well.

A more accurate analogy would be to say that they were playing music on a record player, along with an ultrasonic noise generator, and didn't understand why the dogs were going crazy.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing resolution and accuracy and power. Increase of resolution usually means in one direction. They do things in space-time, shall we say, so this is like saying their computational power has gone up 10,000 times.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been estimated that if you had temperature, pressure, and humidity readings for every cubic foot of atmosphere, you could only predict weather to about a month...if you had the computer power, which you wouldn't.

That's the problem with the famous butterfly effect. ... The microscopic movements dictate large scale events down the road.

This exactly. The instability of chaotic systems is a too often unrecognized unavoidable limit on modeling many systems. DoD has spent trillions of dollars on worthless high resolution weapon systems models - worthless because they require unknowable starting conditions where the slightest change in those conditions can trigger a complete reversal of the outcome. (Source: many years experience at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works...)

Re:Hey, that's great!

[PopeRatzo]

They didn't say they accuracy of their predictions had increased 10-fold. Only that their computing power has. Unless the accuracy of the input data has increased, all we know for sure is that their electricity bill is going to be higher.

I was wondering about that. I don't do mathematical modeling, and my wife, who actually does mathematical modeling is currently on an airplane over the Atlantic coming home so I can't ask her.

Does higher resolution in the model necessarily translate to more accurate predictions? Let's even say that the input data increases. In highly unstable systems, where boundary conditions, stability and error correction are going to have outsized impact on the model, does higher resolution mean more accurate predictions. Or, as you say, does it just mean they've got more powerful computers.

If anyone can answer this, please, no Math. It will be like casting pearls before swine, with me as the swine.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

CFD modeler here. Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yeah, it's the weekend, I don't feel like writing. I write stuff like that for work. Pay me if you want an essay.

Snippy answer: You can get crap out of the best models with the best computers, and you can get 100% accuracy with the back of a napkin. So there's some art to it. The people doing hurricane models are pretty good, though, and there are things that you can do with a massive computer that you can't with a laptop, so if you put some faith in the people, some faith into the models... short answer is yes.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[hey!]

Actually we can predict pretty damn well. It depends on what you compare to: perfection, or what we could predict thirty years ago, or seventy-five years ago.

We're living in an era of rapid improvements in weather forecasting in terms of accuracy, precision and scope. Back in the 70s there was a perennial science fair project in which the student compared the accuracy of tomorrow's weather forecast to simply assuming that tomorrow would be like today. The answer back then was, it was about equally accurate. Today would be a totally different story. The forecasts we get for three days out is better than the forecast we used to get for tomorrow back in the 70s; people just haven't updated their thinking.

It's not surprising when you realize that the difference is satellite tracking, meteorological data networks, and incomprehensibly more powerful computers. Today's smart phones are roughly as powerful as the supercomputers of the 1980s.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, a single molecule still doesn't change crap. One big motion still has more energy than one small motion

The energy is already there, and the butterfly effect is not about adding energy to the system, but influencing the distribution. A lot of instabilities in fluid dynamics magnify small perturbations. So the stuff that doesn't take much energy to change grows, often exponentially, until non-linear larger scale effects let it saturate, at which point much larger amounts of energy are being pushed around. A single molecule might not matter much, as it is smaller than the viscous scale where things do smear out, but the viscous scale is still very small for the atmosphere, with length scales below a millimeter potentially mattering.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[nadaou]

I'll bite.

With a higher resolution you can begin to resolve some of the dynamics of the eye wall, which gives you a much better idea about how the storm's intensity will develop.

There was a very good wunderground blog post about this last week with a /. story about it.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Rainbow Nerds]

I'm going to agree with the AC above me and say yes, increasing the resolution will generally result in a better forecast. There are two areas that generally can improve weather models: better initial conditions for the model and higher resolution.

Hurricane tracks are primarily influenced by large areas of high and low pressure and the accompanying upper-level winds. Even a coarse model with grid points every 50 km will probably produce a reasonably accurate representation of large features. Adding to the resolution might help a bit, but it's not likely to improve the forecasting of hurricane tracks that much.

Hurricane intensity, however, is driven by the storms in the inner core of the hurricane. They typically form a ring around the eye of the storm and are referred to as the eyewall. They're basically thunderstorms but without a lot of lightning, typically less than 10 flashes per hour. Inside those storms, large amounts of water vapor condense, and when this happens, latent heat is released. The latent heat comes from the energy that's no longer being used to keep the molecules of water apart once the state changes from gas to liquid. This heat warms the air, causing the column of air to expand upward. When this happens, you get high pressure at the top of the hurricane, and air spirals out from there. Air is flowing out of the core of the storm at the upper levels, so there's less air to press down on the surface. This causes the surface pressure to fall and the hurricane intensifies. These storms are small, on the order of 20 km across, but they're really important to predicting hurricane intensity. If the model has its grid points spaced 50 km apart, you may not have any grid points to resolve the storms. One of the newer hurricane models, the HWRF, now goes down to a grid point spacing of 2 km. There are a lot more grid points from which to represent the storms in the inner core of the hurricane. That allows much better prediction of hurricane intensity.

For a few decades, hurricane track forecasting had improved quite a bit as the global models could better predict the high and low pressure systems that drive hurricane tracks. During a lot of that time, predictions of hurricane intensity didn't get a lot better. Only within the past decade or so have we seen bigger improvements in forecasting hurricane intensity. That's largely a result of more computing power and models that are able to directly simulate what's going on in the inner core of the hurricane.

I do agree with the AC that it's not as simple as changing a couple of numbers in a configuration file to get a higher resolution and automatically getting a better forecast. There is something of an art to modeling. Even with a really high resolution grid, there are still processes that can't directly be simulated or are on a smaller scale than the grid. We still have to parameterize those. But improving the resolution is generally a good thing.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[TapeCutter]

Thanks, very informative post. Spatial resolution has a major effect on the accuracy on any FEA model. Taken to the extreme, if the block size in a FEA simulation is comparable in size to the Gulf of Mexico, then you won't see hurricanes in your model. One consideration is that the size of a hurricane does not necessarily indicate storm intensity. Cyclone Tracy that hit Darwin in the 70's was an unusually small cyclone, IIRC less than 50km across, but the winds were amongst the strongest ever recorded in Darwin, strong enough to flatten it. I believe Darwin is now a Mecca for storm modellers hunting data, during the wet season a tropical storm conveniently develops over Darwin bay every afternoon, it's like clockwork, locals have a name for it, IIRC it's called "Harry".

To those who are bringing up the "chaos" issue, yes we will never get accurate forecasts more than about a month in advance. Since Tracy hit Darwin in the 70's accuracy has improved from 3 days at best, to 10 days at best, that's extremely useful for the military and commercial logisticts. Predicting cyclone tracks is notoriously difficult but it seems these days that tracks for the next 5 days are usually pretty accurate.Track predictions for any number of days above 1 in the 70's were almost useless. New Orleans had at least 3 days warning, everyone was told a massive storm surge was expected, hell I was 10,000km away in Australia and heard about the expected surge days before it hit. New Orleans was not a natural disaster, it was the "worse than useless" response from authorities that was the problem. Darwin suffered the same "lack of response" problem in the 70's, but to be fair it was a very remote place back then.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[TapeCutter]

The "slashdot paradox" when it comes to the workings of the biosphere is about politics, not science. To many otherwise intelligent people, science that contradicts their political/religious beliefs cannot possibly be "real" science. We all suffer from bias, but to observe an extreme example of this type of bias you need look no further than, Rhodes Scholar and current Prime Minister of Australia - Tony Abbott.

Re:Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not FEA any more than Java is Javascript.

Re: Hey, that's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nasa is a sack of shit. When computers can "predict" what planets do, it will rain santa clauses with full bags. Fuck nasa in the ass. They are no more trustworthy than the crack dealer/methhead who lives down the block.

Petfalops

[Anonymous Coward]

... and runs at 1.995 petfalops.

I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be 'petaflops' (floating operations), right?

Re:Petfalops

[Anonymous Coward]

"floating point operations"

Re:Petfalops

[Anonymous Coward]

per second.

Petfalops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pet fluff allocation operations?

Yes, you've increased the precision

[russotto]

But really, it was the accuracy that was the problem all along.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[ZombieEngineer]

The path of a hurricane is somewhat unpredictable (been known to turn 90 degrees for no apparent reason).

The bigger issue which is harder to address is making homes that can "largely survive" being hit by a hurricane. The biggest issue is the junk flying around due to the strong winds (and storm surge if you are near the water). Once a building starts to disintegrate it provides the wind with ammunition for taking out other buildings.

In Australia when a cyclone is heading towards your community and potentially make land fall within 48 hours there is a whole pile of things that kick in for preparation (food, water, fuel, tie down and clean up - most people will be sent home by work during this period). At about six hours it is a case of bunker down and wait for it to go overhead.

Better prediction will reduce the amount of communities put on alert and associated disruption but unlikely to reduce the damage in affected areas (for that you need better building codes and people willing to take appropriate measures).

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

make land fall within 48 hours there is a whole pile of things that kick in for preparation (food, water, fuel, tie down and clean up - most people will be sent home by work during this period). At about six hours it is a case of bunker down and wait for it to go overhead.

This really depends on how strong the storm is. These days, building a home that can handle the winds from a Category 1 storm isn't that hard. However you still have to worry about the storm surge, stronger storm winds, and the potential for tornadoes. When storm surges can be up to 10 m, and construction to resist severe storms is much harder, it isn't just about attaching roofs to homes better, building above sealevel, and boarding up windows. At some point, the 48 hr mark should be when evacuation preparation is the proper action, with you leaving way before the 6 hour mark.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

Non linear is not the same thing as unpredictable. With perfect sensing, perfect knowledge of boundary and initial conditions and perfect modelling, it is predictable. Since none of those things exist in the real world, predictions diverge exponentially from reality. The closer those things are to perfect, the slower the divergence becomes and the further out the prediction becomes valid.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Rockoon]

The precision isnt even all that much greater either.

In a 3D model, 8x resolution is just 2x along each axis. The summary (and possibly the article) makes it seem like they used to be very block but now its ultra sharp when in reality if it used to be 1km resolution now its 0.46km resolution.

Re: Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point your very accurate pressure measurement can record the speech around the weather station. This will not improve the forecast but will fill nsa agents with joy.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[cusco]

building a home that can handle the winds from a Category 1 storm isn't that hard.

It is when the primary criteria is "build it as cheaply as we can get away with and not have to bribe the building inspector". It's embarrassing the crap being slapped together today, especially to a former remodeler. When you step into a multi-million dollar house and notice that the counter tops aren't even level, the floor trim and cove molding rely on caulk and plastic wood to come together, and the ceiling is so wavy that the chandelier base plate doesn't even touch in places you know damn well that there aren't hurricane braces on the roof joists and the wall framing isn't anchored to the floor joists.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

Down here in south Florida they still have the nerve to permit houses with wood frames and then sell them for a quarter million dollars. I wouldn't even allow wood roofs, let alone wood frames. That's why insurance costs so damn much. It would be cheaper to build the house properly using concrete walls and metal roofs.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[aaarrrgggh]

I think that is another accuracy be precision issue. The storm clips are likely in place, because they are usually a specific inspection item. Being cheap means using all the lumber on the truck, and not rejecting the wavy boards. Building square, straight, and plumb buildings with dimensional lumber is hard. It is much easier to do with TJIs and Glulam, but tolerances are typically over 1/8" in framing.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[nadaou]

The 3D model does not have the same resolution in the Z as it does in the X and Y. If it did you'd be way out in space. The number of Z levels may well have doubled, but more likely from about 10 to about 20 of them.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Rainbow Nerds]

The resolution of the model is the spacing between horizontal grid points. Vertical levels are treated separately. A typical model now uses on the order of 50-100 vertical levels, which has increased substantially in recent years. Models tend to use sigma or eta levels, which are a vertical coordinate system that is terrain following, at least in the lower levels of the atmosphere. The grids are also vertically stretched, resulting in more grid points in the lower levels of the atmosphere. This is necessary because of the complexity in simulating the planetary boundary layer and interactions with the surface. Also, shrinking the distance between grid points requires a corresponding decrease in the model time step. If you cut the distance between grid points in half, typically you'll also need to cut your time step in half, too.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

Even concrete block walls don't do so well with stronger storms, unless heavily reinforced, and metal roofing doesn't gain you much over properly done wood frames, short of going with heavy beams intended for a decent sized office building.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[camg188]

Imagine going from video game figures made of large chunky blocks to detailed human characters that visibly show beads of sweat on their forehead.

But the game is still Pong.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

In 92 all the concrete houses around here survived, not one had to be demolished. The wood frame houses, well, some were missing after the storm.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

And I personally know people who had damaged concrete constructed businesses in Andrew, and even the National Hurricane Center's own building had trouble then. They moved into a newer, stronger building a couple years later, but it isn't even rated to handle category 4-5 winds, not to mention issues with localized damage caused by tornadoes in such storms.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, 300 years ago, the French and Spanish who colonized Louisiana and the Caribbean seemingly knew more about building hurricane-survivable structures than we do today. I think the difference is that now-a-days we have a lot more confidence in our stress calculations and allow lower safety factors.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the Spanish who inspired everyone to use heavy ceramic tiles on their roofs, which in fact end up doing a lot of damage to other structures while not actually providing much protection to the roof. They also managed to lose hundreds to over a thousand people in storms when the state had very few people colonists in it, despite storms now killing fewer than couple dozen out of millions of population. Even very strong structures for their time, like the fort in St. Augustine, have been severely damaged by storms.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Orp]

The path of a hurricane is somewhat unpredictable (been known to turn 90 degrees for no apparent reason).

We've gotten much better at predicting the paths of hurricanes which are, to a first degree of approximation, steered by larger-scale winds that have gotten easier to predict with time because of improved observational data feeding models, as well as the fact that they are easier to resolve and are dictated by things that don't require lots of parameterization (like what you have with convective clouds and precipitation). What we continue to struggle with is the strength of the surface winds over time, which of course is highly desired at landfall. There are small scale processes going on within hurricanes (involving what meteorologists call eyewall replacement cycles) that modulate surface winds and that are less understood and much more difficult to forecast correctly. Basically, the smaller it is, the harder it is to forecast over long time periods.

If I had to choose between getting one or the other right, though, I'll choose path over surface wind strength. Getting out of the way of a Category 2 vs getting out of the way of a Category 5 is pretty much the same process!

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[NoOneInParticular]

Although technically what you state is true (closer to perfect leads to further out predictions), there is a catch here. The rate between increases in precision and increases in accuracy is itself non-linear. Non-linear dynamical systems are governed by things called Lyapunov exponents. These define the relationship between the precision of your measurement and the accuracy of your prediction over time. Unfortunately, in the case of Earth's atmospheres the Lyapunov exponents are such that you would need an exponential increase in precision to reach linear increase in accuracy. That's what defines a chaotic system. This gives a limit on how far you can predict in the future, as at some point, you hit Planck lengths for your measurements, and you would need to increase precision in the quantum world, which is considered to be impossible as modeled by Heisenberg's inequality. The exponential nature of the relationship makes this happen sooner than you would like.

I'm not sure where that boundary exactly lies in the case of Earth's atmosphere, but it can very well be that a ten-fold increase in precision leads to a 1.1 increase in accuracy, with another ten fold increase in precision adding just 1.01 (just making the numbers up). This issue of exponentially diminishing returns is well-known in the weather modeling world, so they typically use ensemble models. Instead of running one simulation and trying to increase the precision of that one, they run a few hundred with random perturbances of the initial conditions. This gives a good overview of what the future could bring. I think that's a more principled way to use computational resources than increasing precision of a single model (though, if the payoff in accuracy is good enough for the ensemble, it might be worth it).

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Rainbow Nerds]

You said a lot of good things in your post, but I'd like to add to it a bit. Your explanation of why we've made more gains in track forecasting than intensity forecasting is correct. You're also correct about the scale-dependence of the predicting the atmosphere.

Once we get down to a horizontal grid spacing of 4 km or so, we no longer parameterize thunderstorms. The grid spacing is sufficient to explicitly resolve them, so we turn the cumulus parameterization off. In older and coarser models, there is an assumption made of hydrostatic balance. In most cases, this is a good assumption. At a large scale, the atmosphere is in hydrostatic balance. Air pressure decreases as you go up in the atmosphere. The pressure gradient force (PGF) is an acceleration from high to low pressure, so there is an upward PGF. In hydrostatic balance, the upward PGF is balanced out by the downward acceleration from gravity. This allows for vertical motion but no vertical accelerations. In models that assume hydrostatic balance, there are in practice vertical accelerations that arise from other equations, but the models don't explicitly predict dw/dt (the change in vertical velocity with respect to time). You can always have a prognostic equation for dw/dt, but with a coarse horizontal grid spacing, there's not a big difference in the forecast if the model is hydrostatic or non-hydrostatic. The difference start to become more significant around the 4 km horizontal grid spacing mark. A thunderstorm is most definitely not in hydrostatic balance, so we wouldn't want to simulate it as if it were.

The deep moist convection in the inner core of a hurricane modulates intensity beyond eyewall cycles. Hot towers around the inner core of a storm are associated with rapid intensification. Hot towers are intense storms that generate enough heat within them that the cloud tops rise higher in the atmosphere. A great example of this is Hurricane Humberto in 2007, which set a record for the most rapid decrease in minimum central pressure as it intensified off the coast of Texas. The best video of this I could find is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilz5t1WwMZY, which shows the infrared satellite with data from land-based radars in Texas overlaid. The rapid cooling of the cloud tops and stronger radar echoes show the hot towers that led to the rapid intensification of Humberto. In addition to eyewall replacement cycles, we can explicitly simulate things like the development of hot towers around the core of the storm.

If we can reduce the uncertainty in hurricane strength forecasts, we can hopefully get people to evacuate sooner when it's necessary and have fewer false alarms. If we're confident that a major hurricane will strike, people probably ought to evacuate regardless of whether it's going to be a category 3 or a category 5 storm. However, if the range is from a strong tropical storm to a category 3 storm, people may be more reluctant to evacuate. The latter is generally a more common situation than the former.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Orp]

You may turn CP off but you're sure as hell still parameterizing (microphysics!! And just how many choices do you have for those fun knobs!). And 4km is still pretty damned coarse for thunderstorms. But yeah there is clearly more to surface wind intensity than eyewall replacement, that's just an example of something that is thought to play a role and that is definitely handled better with finer meshes (tropical is not my expertise).

We're doing much better, but we've still got a lot of work to do to get hurricanes right - some of it is with the models, some of it (more, in my opinion) has to do with what we feed the models. Hoping GOES R will be a big help. Pray for a launch that doesn't blow up on the launchpad.

Good riddance to cumulus parameterization, when that day comes in everything but climate models (let's not get too carried away) I will dance with glee on reams of printouts of CP code. Microphysics is a big enough kludge but I don't think we're going to be following raindrops and snowlfakes around in our models for a long, long time.

Re:Yes, you've increased the precision

[Thelasko]

This is why if I build a custom house, I am hiring an architect/engineer and a professional construction manager that is not associated with the contractor to make sure it is built to spec. A well designed and built house can do amazing things. Unfortunately, most people are only willing to pay for appearance and ignore performance.

Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Ecuador]

Nice and all, but the model resolution was never the problem. E.g. Katrina was going to hit whatever model we had, with not much warning. The problem was the response.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[known_coward_69]

maybe bush should have parked those trucks in the disaster zone to be flooded? maybe people should have listened to the evacuation order and left the area?

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

The storm wasn't the problem, the inhabitants were the problem.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

People forget we had another disaster under Clinton, where it became obvious the head of FEMA was just a political spoils job, an incompetent. Officials swore no more! All FEMA appointees from here on out will be competent managers!

"You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!"

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

The storm wasn't the problem, the inhabitants were the problem.

Wait? It was the same fools who voted Ray Nagin into office?

Whoda thunk!!!

Re: Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Brownie was under Bush, not Clinton. Dufus.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[CanadianMacFan]

I thought the problem was the many decades of managing the Mississippi which led to the ongoing disappearance of the marshes plus the development of the city on a very low area that was likely to flood.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[cusco]

The poor couldn't leave, because free/cheap transportation wasn't available except in a few situations (church buses and the like). ( And if you're poor in Louisiana you're about as poor as you can get in the US.) Even many of the nursing homes weren't evacuated unless they were able to afford to arrange specialty transportation.

Yeah, it would have been nice if more people had evacuated, but after a series of free market fanatics running the state government there just wasn't the capacity.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[fustakrakich]

The problem was the response.

The problem was the decision not to shore up the levees. The problem is cutting corners to save pennies. The bigger problem is that we let them. Hurricanes don't have to be anything more than a nuisance. The disaster is man made.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

No the problem is big 'gubment. The invisible hand and ogliarcs will protect us!

Oh, wait.

Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

An even more insurmountable problem is that New Orleans only has about 16-20 lanes of highway going out of it, thanks to all the surrounding wetlands. I put it to you that getting 500,000 (maybe more) people out on 20 lanes in 72 hours is, in fact, impossible at any price. Starting 24 hours before Katrina, I-10 was total parking lot from well south of Baton Rouge to the Texas state line (at least this was reported on the radio). Under normal conditions, this is a 4.5 hour drive.

Now

[JustOK]

Now all their predictions are simply: It's gonna Rain Sideways!

Beware the dreaded petfalop, my son!

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast can 45K cores do auto-correct?

Re:Beware the dreaded petfalop, my son!

[Anonymous Coward]

Still not fast enough to keep up with my profanity.

I may be drunk, but...

[killfixx]

What the hell is a petfalop?

HAHAHA!

Hooray beer!

Why are typos so much funnier when drunk?

Re:I may be drunk, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The computer saves the generated output in petafiles.

Re:I may be drunk, but...

[martinfb]

Because your brain was replaced by intoxicants!

Still wouldn't have made Ray Nagin competent

[Anonymous Coward]

All the computers in the world working together couldn't have given New Orleans' mayor competence.

Acres of flooded-out school buses that could have been used to evacuate.

Re:Still wouldn't have made Ray Nagin competent

[cusco]

The school buses didn't belong to the school district, much less the city. These free-market idiots who believe in privatizing everything to make it more expensive and less efficient had ensured that there were no school buses available to move people. Nagin was an idiot, but that was one failure that can't be laid at his feet.

More disturbing to me was that Cuba had sent a ship full of doctors and Venezuela had sent a tanker full of fuel for hospital generators, and both were turned back by the Navy. Most of the hospitals stayed staffed by nurses and candy stripers (the doctors could afford to evacuate) until the All Clear, and the generators ran out of fuel until Halliburton trucks could get to them (even domestic trucks of donated fuel were turned back because only authorized vendors selling at elevated prices were allowed in).

Re: Still wouldn't have made Ray Nagin competent

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you come on down to drive those buses? 93% of us evacuated. Besides, for 2 days the city sent buses to every nook and cranny picking up everyone that wanted to evacuate.

Re:Still wouldn't have made Ray Nagin competent

[pipingguy]

"even domestic trucks of donated fuel were turned back because only authorized vendors selling at elevated prices were allowed in"

Got a link for that?

Re:Still wouldn't have made Ray Nagin competent

[cusco]

Not any more, the Alternet Forums are long gone. One of the regular posters there owned a petroleum distributorship in Pennsylvania. They drove a truck of diesel down with the intent of donating it to one of the hospitals, but were turned back. They were specifically told that only trucks contracted by Halliburton or KBR (can't remember which) were being allowed in. The only links I can find at the moment are for the Walmart trucks full of water being refused entry, and qualified first responders being made to wait for a week or more and never being allowed entry, and the Coast Guard vessel that wanted to offload 1000 gallons of diesel to trucks supplied by one of the parish governments and not being allowed to.

What about the Gulf Coast of Mississippi???

[Cutting_Crew]

Thats where the eye of the storm went over. Gulfport/Biloxi was completely destroyed but lets keep posting information about just New Orleans because.. ya know.

Re:What about the Gulf Coast of Mississippi???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Katrina didn't hit New Orleans. They took east and north winds, they got rained on, and the levees broke. Plaquemines parish and St Bernard parish were the only parishes in Louisiana that got hit by the eye and/or the "bad" side (east side storm surge) but nobody talks about those. Nobody talks about Hancock county, Harrison county, or Jackson county, only New Orleans. Even Mobile took a storm surge and had bridge damage. Here on the Mississippi gulf coast we're pretty much back to normal but New Orleans is still not built back.

Hurricane prediction is still almost useless

[Anonymous Coward]

My trust in hurricane prediction drops off exponentially after a prediction time of about 3 hours. So hurricane prediction models are *still* almost useless. I live in south Florida and every year I watch all these silly predictions end up being completely wrong. Even if the predictions are right I would doubt that they are right for the correct reasons.

Re:Hurricane prediction is still almost useless

[Anonymous Coward]

And that comment was still useless.

Re:Hurricane prediction is still almost useless

[Anonymous Coward]

In 3 hours, many hurricanes will not have moved much more than half the diameter of their eye... and if you are that close to the center of the storm to "trust" the predictions, then you already screwed up preparing for it. Alternatively, you could look at actually quantitative errors in predictions (an example link is in another comment a ways above), you will see that 24 and 48 hr ones are quite useful, and that is being extended out further.

Hurricanes are wet and noisy.

[fustakrakich]

If one is approaching, be sure to stock up on plenty of munchies, beer and weed. Use a bunch of car batteries through an inverter to avoid the clanking, rattling generator.

What else is there to know? I mean, besides not building matchstick homes so close to the open seas where there are hurricanes? And certainly not below sea level! What were they thinking? Trying to save a few pennies? You don't need high resolution to know that doing stuff on the cheap is pretty risky business. Though I'm sure the pictures look nice.

What was wrong...

[kenh]

What was wrong with Katrina-era models? We knew several days before it hit shore how bad Katrina was going to be... The issue was the pitiful evacuation, not the lack of advance notice.

Re:What was wrong...

[Rainbow Nerds]

Actually, no, that's not correct at all. Even as Katrina was crossing south Florida, three day forecasts were pretty far off. The forecasts certainly didn't call for it to become a major hurricane. Here are some forecast graphics for you:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/graphics/AT12/10.AL1205W5.GIF
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/graphics/AT12/10.AL1205I.GIF

The three day forecast called for a category 2 hurricane moving in the general direction of Panama City, FL. The rapid intensification of a number of hurricanes that year wasn't predicted well. You can animate the graphics for yourself, if you'd like. Here's a link: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/KATRINA_graphics.shtml.

The rapid intensification of Rita wasn't forecast well at all. Forecasts predicted it hitting south Texas for awhile rather than near the Texas/Louisiana border. Rita was forecast to become a major hurricane, but not as strong as it became.

The forecast track of Wilma was actually really good. However, the rapid intensification from a minimal category 1 hurricane to a 175 mph category 5 hurricane in 24 hours wasn't forecast at all.

All the NHC forecasts for 2005 are archived at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/. If you look at the strongest hurricanes that year, you'll see that the rapid intensification cycles were pretty much not in the official forecasts at all. The track forecasts weren't great, but generally were just within the margin of error.

The hurricane forecasts in 2005 left a lot to be desired. Pretty much nobody knew several days before those storms how bad they were going to be.

Re: What was wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is correct and you are wrong. People had plenty of advanced warning to evacuate, they just chose to ride it out.

Re: What was wrong...

[Rainbow Nerds]

Nothing excuses Ray Nagin's incompetence once hurricane watches and warnings were issued for Louisiana. Although Nagin did encourage evacuation, he also promised residents who didn't evacuate that, "we will take care of you." The city didn't keep that promise and it certainly gave people incentive to stay when they might have otherwise evacuated. Furthermore, the hurricane wasn't actually what killed people in New Orleans. The levees broke because they weren't properly designed and maintained, despite ample warning. It was known back in 1965 that the levees and flood walls were inadequate and improvements were estimated to be complete by 1978. By 2005, the work was still incomplete with an estimated finish in 2015. Much of the levee and flood wall design issues can be blamed on the Army Corps of Engineers. Had the levees been designed and maintained properly so they didn't break, almost nobody would have died in New Orleans. There's plenty of blame to go around and not all of it belongs with people who chose to ride out an indirect hit from what had then weakened to a category 3 hurricane.

However, it's absolutely false that the forecast models in 2005 were adequate. The models weren't capable of resolving the storms at the inner core of hurricanes and couldn't provide forecasters with guidance about the rapid intensification of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The grid spacing of models in 2005 was simply incapable of resolving the inner core of hurricanes, which is essential to accurately predicting intensity. Instead, intensity forecasts relied on statistical models that do well in a wide variety of situations, but not during those rapid intensification cycles. The intensity forecasts for those storms was particularly awful and the forecast tracks of Katrina and Rita left a lot to be desired.

And yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite having all this technology, weather forecasters cannot predict within 50% accuracy the next day's weather of America's largest cities.

NASA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we care about NASA modeling of Hurricanes? The National Hurricane Center is part of NOAA.

Re:NASA?

[Rainbow Nerds]

NHC forecasters consider a very large number of models when making hurricane forecasts. Many of these aren't run by NOAA. Here's an old list: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/modelsummary.shtml. NHC has used the NOGAPS model for a long time. NOGAPS is a global model developed and run by the US Navy. If a NASA model can make useful predictions, NHC forecasters will certainly use it.

Sub-Pixel-Sampling and Linear Interpolation

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing new.

Same old fraud from new kittens at NASA.

Ha ha

Prevention

[manu0601]

It is nice to know a disaster will strike, but it is another story to handle it properly. Is there any progress here, or will we see again medias calling theives the people that seek survival by taking food from closed supermarkets?

Hurricanes hitting USA is down since 2005

[zapadnik]

It is is good that this progress has been made while the number of hurricanes that have made landfall in the US has plummeted since the bad year of 2005, Hopefully, path prediction should be better if they do start hitting land again - assuming the number of hurricanes doesn't decrease with the solar slowdown:

Data plotted: http://www.weatherstreet.com/h...

From:
http://www.weatherstreet.com/h...

Re:Hurricanes hitting USA is down since 2005

[manu0601]

assuming the number of hurricanes doesn't decrease with the solar slowdown:

Don't worry, you will have other hurricanes.

So what...?

[TimothyDavis]

"the supercomputer has more than 45,000 processor cores and runs at petfalops."

So what happened here? Is this like the cubic centimeter limits for motors where if you go over a size limit new rules go into effect? Like you don't have to pay to register your supercomputer if it is under 2.000 "petfalops" (whatever the hell that is)?

...or did someone realize after it was built that Excel had been rounding on them, and they were 113 processors short of the 2 "petfalops" system specified in the bid?

Unnecessary effort.

[RockDoctor]

All you need to know is how far from the coast you need to live. If people are stupid enough to live close to hurricane-prone shores, they are welcome to die for their housing choice.