Article from: MSNBC Staff and Wire Reports
June 1, 2001

Higher Hopes For Hurricane Forecasts
Season Starts With New Tools, But Many Residents Unprepared

RALEIGH, N.C., June 1 — The hurricane season officially got under way Friday, with forecasters ready to deploy new tools to improve on last year’s botched predictions. Although a horrendous season had been forecast, no major hurricane hit the U.S. coast in 2000, and that might have contributed to a false sense of security by many coastal residents, a new Red Cross survey reveals.

THE SURVEY found that only 52 percent of coastal residents in the states from North Carolina to Texas report having an evacuation plan.

“Our greatest concern is that people have evidently been lulled into a false sense of security because the United States was spared from a major hurricane last year,” said John Clizbe, American Red Cross disaster services vice president. “The dangers of hurricanes are real, and it is imperative that people at risk be prepared.”

Government hurricane experts expect five to seven hurricanes to threaten the East and Gulf coasts this year — about average — and have urged coastal residents to be prepared.

But the Red Cross found that in the southern coastal states, just 53 percent of residents reported having a hurricane supply kit.

About two-thirds of the respondents said they had been in a hurricane before.

The poll was based on 500 respondents contacted by random calls in May to residents of 177 coastal counties along the East and Gulf coasts. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Even before the season officially started, the first hurricane had formed off Mexico. By Friday, however, Adolph was quickly dissipating.

NASA, NOAA Tools

Last year, forecasters predicted a severe hurricane season. But when it was over, not a single storm had made landfall in the United States.

A year earlier, tens of thousands of people sat in traffic jams along the southern Atlantic coast, fleeing a hurricane that wound up not even coming close to their homes.

Weather experts expect new methods to produce vast improvements this year in tracking hurricanes and predicting their intensity.

The most significant are improved measuring devices that will be dropped into storms from above.

NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration both plan to have two planes aloft this season, studying hurricanes top to bottom. Pencil-shaped devices ranging from 1 to 3 feet in length will be dropped into the storms to measure everything from wind velocity and moisture to water temperature and salinity.

“It’s really a kind of revolutionary time in our field,” said Joseph Cione, a hurricane meteorologist at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. “This has the potential to really answer a lot of questions.”

In addition, an Australian company is seeking U.S. permission to fly pilotless robotic planes into this year’s storms.

The Aerosonde Ltd. drone weighs about 31 pounds and has a wingspan of 9+ feet. It launches from a car’s roof rack and carries high-tech measuring equipment.

Maurice Gonella, Aerosonde’s principal engineer, said the $100,000 drones can be put on autopilot and will constantly relay information and take photographs. “To get an aircraft to fly, say, at 1,000 feet for 24 hours is a huge task, whereas an unmanned drone can do that easily,” he said.

Other Improvements

Government and university researchers are deploying other improvements as well. Some examples:

A new computer model will study the ocean as well as the atmosphere to track and measure storms. Researchers now believe warm ocean temperatures feed hurricanes. But as hurricanes spin in place, they cool the waters below them and become weaker.

“Until this year, that effect wasn’t in our hurricane model,” said Morris Bender, research meteorologist at the federal Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. “As a result, it caused our model to overpredict how strong storms are going to get.”

Isaac Ginis, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, pioneered the line of study and said the “coupled model” should improve intensity predictions by 30 percent.

Changes in data interpretation should better simulate hurricanes moving across the oceans. That snapshop is taken by the National Weather Service four times a day, using data from satellites, weather balloons and other sources.

Bender said the changes have allowed him to decrease his “track error” by up to 10 percent, or 20 miles. More precise tracking can mean huge savings: Officials estimate it costs an average of $1 million for every mile of U.S. coast evacuated.

Extended forecasts are in the works. The weather service currently makes hurricane projections no more than 72 hours out. The agency is experimenting this year with five-day forecasting, but the results will be kept in -house — for now.

“The goal is ... if we do this, and it turns out that we’re good at it, that we would make these forecasts public in 2003,” said James Franklin, a specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.