National Hurricane Conference Questions

[Aric Dunn]

I will be attending the the National Hurricane Conference this week and would be willing to ask the experts any outstanding questions you all have about the upcoming season or anything tropical weather related. So if you have a particular question just post it below and I will post the answer they give throughout the week as the interviews are conducted.

Also if you could try to word your questions in a clear and concise way that would be much obliged, as it would not require me to alter the question in anyway, also if you have a particular person who you want to answer it just put their name and I will try to get that person.

oh almost forgot ... since all the interviews and the conference itself will be streamed live; if you want your name attached with the question when I ask them, then with your question you will have to give your real name either first or last or both which ever you want.

this is where the live stream will be. http://ipr365.com/station/
Thanks

[boca]

Is their anyway to guess on what the steering currents might be.Example if we have a strong or weak bermuda high? Are their models that can predict such a thing.

[cycloneye]

Will the QBO winds be a factor in the 2010 Atlantic season?

[Derek Ortt]

QBO was demonstrated 6 years ago to have little affect on hurricane season activity

[Aric Dunn]

QBO was demonstrated 6 years ago to have little affect on hurricane season activity

yeah I have asked Dr gray that a few times and the correlation just never showed its face, but i will ask him again if any further studies are being done with respect to the QBO since every layer of the atmosphere is connected it still may be found that some sort of effect from it does occur..

[JonathanBelles]

Where will the conference be streamed live (link?)?


Question:
Where and how can upcoming Meteorology students get into the field of Tropical Meteorology?

Question (could be better worded, but I cannot think):
Do you expect the rate of shrinkage for the Cone of Uncertainty to accelerate, remain steady, or slow? (Backround information: From 2009 to 2010, the Cone will shrink 3-5% in size).

Question:
Are there any new trouble spots in tropical forecasting as related to 5-10 years ago?

Question:
What effects will the loss of the QuikScat satellite have on forecasting for the 2010 Hurricane Season?



Sorry for the lot of questions. lol (Wish I was there to ask these myself!)

[HURAKAN]

What effect do you think the current expansion of the Sahara Desert will have on future hurricane seasons?

[Aric Dunn]

Where will the conference be streamed live (link?)?


Question:
Where and how can upcoming Meteorology students get into the field of Tropical Meteorology?

Question (could be better worded, but I cannot think):
Do you expect the rate of shrinkage for the Cone of Uncertainty to accelerate, remain steady, or slow? (Backround information: From 2009 to 2010, the Cone will shrink 3-5% in size).

Question:
Are there any new trouble spots in tropical forecasting as related to 5-10 years ago?

Question:
What effects will the loss of the QuikScat satellite have on forecasting for the 2010 Hurricane Season?



Sorry for the lot of questions. lol (Wish I was there to ask these myself!)

can you be a little more clear on questions 2 and 3 please...

[cycloneye]

Below is the schedule of the conference.The last three days will be the most important.

http://www.hurricanemeeting.com/schedule.asp

[hurricanetrack]

Will Duke win it all?



Could not resist. Aric- I hope I'll see you there. If you're not busy Thursday night, come out to our meet and greet in Casselberry. If you're interested, PM me or what have you and I'll fill you in. Good luck with the streaming stuff. Jason Foster sure has been plugging it on his Twitter feed. I'll put a link to it on hurricanetrack.com as well.

[cycloneye]

Where will the conference be streamed live (link?)?


Question:
Where and how can upcoming Meteorology students get into the field of Tropical Meteorology?

Question (could be better worded, but I cannot think):
Do you expect the rate of shrinkage for the Cone of Uncertainty to accelerate, remain steady, or slow? (Backround information: From 2009 to 2010, the Cone will shrink 3-5% in size).

Question:
Are there any new trouble spots in tropical forecasting as related to 5-10 years ago?

Question:
What effects will the loss of the QuikScat satellite have on forecasting for the 2010 Hurricane Season?



Sorry for the lot of questions. lol (Wish I was there to ask these myself!)

There will be two live streams from the conference.

http://ipr365.com/station/#

The other by Mark Sudduth at hurricanetrack.com

[MGC]

Any progress being made in reguards to intensity forecasts?.....MGC

[JonathanBelles]

Where will the conference be streamed live (link?)?


Question:
Where and how can upcoming Meteorology students get into the field of Tropical Meteorology?

Question (could be better worded, but I cannot think):
Do you expect the rate of shrinkage for the Cone of Uncertainty to accelerate, remain steady, or slow? (Backround information: From 2009 to 2010, the Cone will shrink 3-5% in size).

Question:
Are there any new trouble spots in tropical forecasting as related to 5-10 years ago?

Question:
What effects will the loss of the QuikScat satellite have on forecasting for the 2010 Hurricane Season?



Sorry for the lot of questions. lol (Wish I was there to ask these myself!)

can you be a little more clear on questions 2 and 3 please...

Question #2: From 2009 to 2010, the National Hurricane Center will shrink the "Cone of Uncertainty" by 3-5%. In the next 1-5 years, do you expect this rate of narrowing (of the cone) to keep steady, accelerate to 5% a year or more, or slow down to less than 3% a year?

Question #3: Without giving examples, I cannot make that question any more clear.

[cycloneye]

Aric,what happened with the Q&A?

[wxman57]

Question 1:
Where and how can upcoming Meteorology students get into the field of Tropical Meteorology?

Question 2 (could be better worded, but I cannot think):
Do you expect the rate of shrinkage for the Cone of Uncertainty to accelerate, remain steady, or slow? (Background information: From 2009 to 2010, the Cone will shrink 3-5% in size).

Question 3:
Are there any new trouble spots in tropical forecasting as related to 5-10 years ago?

Question 4:
What effects will the loss of the QuikScat satellite have on forecasting for the 2010 Hurricane Season?

Sorry for the lot of questions. lol (Wish I was there to ask these myself!)

I attended all the presentations at the NHC, so maybe I can answer a few questions related to the conference.

Question #1 doesn't relate to the conference. However, the first step is to be very good in math/physics in high school then attend an accredited college, preferably one which has a good tropical program like FSU or Colorado State. These days, it seems you need at least a master's degree.

Question #2 about the cone - the error cone is simply a product of the last 5 years forecast error. It represents a 66.7% error, meaning 66.7% of the time, the center of the hurricane tracked within the cone over the past 5 years. There's no guarantee the cone will shrink from year to year. Some years it may actually increase in size if the forecast error was a bit greater than normal.

One interesting thing that was discussed with respect to the cone was that the NHC is thinking of using a variable cone size in the future. The size would change according to how much the models agree on the track. Models clustered tightly together and the cone size would shrink. Problem with this is that model consensus is NOT necessarily a good sign that the models are right. Don't look for this change anytime soon.

Question #3 is somewhat vague. New trouble spots? Lots of old ones, but nothing new.

Question #4 - The loss of QuikSCAT will have a very minimal (if any) impact on forecasting. QuikSCAT could help to identify a closed circulation in a system that was too far out to sea for recon to investigate it, but that's about it. Nice to have, but not really necessary for making a good forecast. And there's still the European ASCAT satellite that takes similar measurements, though not as frequently. It was mentioned that India will be launching a satellite with capabilities similar to that of QuikSCAT this year. It's possible that they may share the data with us by the 2011-2012 season. India doesn't like to share much, though.

As for any replacement to QS, nothing has been funded and nothing is scheduled. The next generation of satellite (XOVWM) is many years away.

Oh, and another semi-hot topic was the coming 6-7 day forecast track. Bill Read was talking about extending the track out to 7 days at one session. He didn't really know if there was any need for such a long forecast, so he called out to me in the audience to address the issue. I told him about our deepwater clients in the Gulf that need a good 6-7 days in some cases to prepare for an approaching storm. They could definitely benefit from a 7-day track (we're already making 7-day forecasts, by the way).

It appears that the NHC is going to experiment in-house with making 7-day forecasts beginning in 2011-2012 with the goal of going public around 2015. Meanwhile, output from HWRF and GFDL will be extended out to 7 days. I'm not sure when the HWRF and GFDL model output will include days 6 and 7, or if that extended data will be made public.

Any other questions?

[wxman57]

Any progress being made in reguards to intensity forecasts?.....MGC

There has been a little progress in recent years by introducing coupled air/sea interactions to the GFDL/HWRF. You may have noticed that the HWRF really sucked at intensity forecasts last year? Changes were made to the 2009 HWRF for 2010. When past storms were rerun with the changes, the HWRF no longer had that very high bias. In fact, the bias is now slightly negative. Overall, though, there has been very little improvement in intensity forecasts over the past 20-30 years. A big problem is that intensity is highly-dependent on relatively brief inner core fluctuations, which the models cannot forecast. We need a lot more quality data from within the hurricane to make a better intensity forecast.

[wxman57]

Is their any way to guess on what the steering currents might be.Example if we have a strong or weak Bermuda High? Are their models that can predict such a thing.

There are models that predict seasonal pressures across the Basin. The European is one such model. For July-September, it's predicting much lower pressures in the Tropical Atlantic (see below) and much higher pressures in the East Pac. This means the Euro sees the negative NAO continuing into the peak season. A negative NAO means a weaker Bermuda High, less low-latitude wind shear, warmer SSTs in the MDR,and overall much more favorable conditions for development. This could lead to an enhanced Cape Verde season in 2010. But the weaker Bermuda High may allow a number of the CV storms to recurve well east of the U.S. (maybe not east of the eastern Caribbean, though (think 1995).

[brunota2003]

I have a few questions that maybe someone here can answer, that have been bugging me the last few days...

How is it possible that hurricanes can have a high pressure sitting over top of them? (I.E., the strongest ones have the anticyclonic flow on the top, fanning out the cirrus) How is that possible, without generating shear that would tear the system up? How high does the counterclockwise flow of the low extend, before switching to the clockwise of a high pressure? Is there a space in there somewhere where the winds do not turn in any direction at all?

I guess "high pressure" might not be the right term, but I think I've heard it referred to as that before in the past?

[wxman57]

I have a few questions that maybe someone here can answer, that have been bugging me the last few days...

How is it possible that hurricanes can have a high pressure sitting over top of them? (I.E., the strongest ones have the anticyclonic flow on the top, fanning out the cirrus) How is that possible, without generating shear that would tear the system up? How high does the counterclockwise flow of the low extend, before switching to the clockwise of a high pressure? Is there a space in there somewhere where the winds do not turn in any direction at all?

I guess "high pressure" might not be the right term, but I think I've heard it referred to as that before in the past?

A hurricane is a warm-core cyclone. Such a cyclone weakens with height, as opposed to a cold-core low which actually strengthens with height. With a warm-core cyclone, the strongest inflow is closer to the surface (about 1500ft). The air spirals in (cyclonically) in the lower levels, rises into columns of heavy rain/squalls, and eventually reaches the top of the storm. Once there, the air must be evacuated away from the center or the hurricane would weaken rapidly. So the air spreads out at the top of the hurricane and flows away from the center. The Coriolis force turns the winds to the right (northern hemisphere) and the air flows out in an anticyclonic direction. I think that the page below explains it pretty well:

http://www.newmediastudio.org/DataDisco ... truct.html

[brunota2003]

So what I pick up from that is, the stronger the high aloft, the stronger the hurricane will be because the high helps "evacuate" more air, which results in more air being needed to replace the air leaving (which also decreases pressure, hence the air moving in to replace it).

So, thinking about cyclones in the past, in order to make up for lower than usual levels of SSTs, cyclones like Vince or Hurricane Epsilon (especially) needed extremely strong highs above them in order to "make" up for the lack of warmer SSTs to contribute to more air moving around, correct? Which would explain why some storms tend to be more resistant to cooling waters than others.