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KEEPIN' THE STREAK ALIVE
Submitted by Guest on Fri, 09/14/2007 - 7:18am.
I was eating dinner with my wife a few weeks ago when I made an unintentionally prophetic observation about hurricane season. In my 9 years forecasting in southeastern North Carolina, I couldn't remember a single year in which our state avoided a Tropical Storm Watch. And sure enough, the recent passage of Tropical Storm Gabrielle prompted the National Hurricane Center to issue watches again this year, keeping the streak alive. Gabrielle was the type of storm that can drive a meteorologist batty. For starters, the system intensified quickly just a few hundred miles away from land. In less than 24 hours, Gabrielle transitioned from a small swirl of clouds lacking any definitive structure into a strong tropical storm. To make matters worse, computer models were forecasting wildly different paths for Gabrielle. You see, tropical systems do not simply move on their own power. They are often guided by surrounding weather features such as cold fronts and high pressure ridges. In order to accurately forecast a tropical system's movement, you have to accurately forecast the movement and development of every single feature around it. Needless to say, this can be difficult. In the case of Gabrielle, the forecast path depended heavily on the movements of a slow-moving high pressure ridge sliding offshore of New England, an accelerating cold front to the west, and the intensification potential of the Gulf Stream waters. To make things a little more complicated, the storm was only about 48 hours away from land when it started to develop. Such proximity poses several problems with regards to public notification. Obviously, a forecaster doesn't want to create needless panic and scare people away from the beaches. But we also have be be cautious and practical. A lot of things can happen to a developing storm in 48 hours. The recent strengthening of Hurricane Humberto along the Gulf Coast is a classic example. At 7 AM on Wednesday, September 12, the system was not even a depression. By 8 AM Thursday, the system was onshore in Texas producing 85 mph winds as a full blown hurricane. No matter how much we think we know about these storms, we'll never know it all... (Comments? Send Jerry an email at jjackson@wwaytv3.com) By: » |
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