Paper on a way to initialize idealized hurricane models published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

Computer models developed to forecast the weather need to know what is currently happening in the atmosphere and in the ocean, what we call “initial conditions,” each time the model starts. The process of making these initial conditions is known as “initialization.” This study is about a new initialization method for both the atmosphere and …

10th Anniversary of Aerosonde flying into hurricane-force winds

On November 2, 2007, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Aerosonde flew into Tropical Storm Noel.  This marks the first time a UAV flew into an Atlantic tropical cyclone while encountering hurricane-force winds. The flying probe was produced by the Australian-based Aerosonde Pty Ltd. (now Textron Systems) which had been manufacturing sensors since 1995.  It reached …

15th Anniversary of Hurricane Lili

  On the morning of October 3, 2002, Hurricane Lili made landfall on the Louisiana coast, just seven days after Hurricane Isidore had struck the same area.  Lili had already ravaged Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba and was to bring further grief to Louisiana and Mississippi. Lili began as a African easterly wave moving into the …

Tenth anniversary of Hurricane Felix

On 24 August, a tropical wave moved westward off the African coast, gradually becoming organized enough to become a tropical depression a week later almost 200 n mi east southeast of Barbados.  Within 12 h, it became Tropical Storm Felix about 60 n mi south of Barbados.  A period of rapid intensification commenced, and Felix …

25th Anniversary of Hurricane Andrew striking South Florida

In the early morning hours of August 24, 1992, Category-Five Hurricane Andrew roared across southern Florida leaving behind a trail of devastation that stunned the nation.  Andrew was the first hurricane of this ferocity to hit the continental United States since Hurricane Camille in 1969, and repercussions of its landfall were felt in the world …

AOML and HRD researchers at 32nd AMS Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, San Juan, Puerto Rico – 10-14 April 2016

Twenty-three AOML and HRD scientists participated in the recent 32nd AMS Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology in San Juan, PR, as authors or co-authors on 36 presentations and 11 posters. Roughly 650 presentations (452 oral presentations in 70 sessions and 196 posters in 2 session) were submitted to the conference. Of the 440 TC-related presentations …

HRD & AOML researchers at 96th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA – 11-14 January 2016

Abstracts and recordings of  the 19 presentations and 5 posters AOML & HRD researchers presented (or were co-authors) at the 96th AMS Annual Meeting are available online from the AMS website: Presentations: A First Look at the Impact of Coyote UAS Observations from Hurricane Edouard (2014) on Tropical Cyclone Data Assimilation and Prediction – Altug …

10th Anniversary of Hurricane Wilma

In the early morning hours of October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma came ashore on Florida's Gulf coast.  The storm had set records and then ravaged the Yucatan Peninsula prior to this final landfall, but it still had plenty of power left to inflict great damage on southern Florida. The 2005 hurricane season was already one …

Paper on how the Developmental Testbed Center facilitates the use of HWRF by the community published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

The paper can be accessed at http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00093.1.

10th Anniversary of Hurricane Rita

Early on the morning of September 24, 2005, Major Hurricane Rita came ashore near the Texas/Louisiana border.  In the midst of the very active 2005 hurricane season, Rita caused considerable panic as it approached the coast, with scenes of destruction from Hurricane Katrina still playing on TV news programs.  It left behind a swath of …