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

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.