Paper on the ability of forecast models to predict the extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey (2017) released Atmosphere

Hurricane Harvey brought up to 5 feet of rainfall to Texas and Louisiana in just a few days in 2017. The strongest rainfall typically happens near the center (eye) of a hurricane. Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall was unusually located far away from the eye. These unusual events make it difficult for forecast models to correctly predict …

Study of how a new NOAA regional hurricane model performed during the 2019 hurricane season published in Atmosphere.

You can read the full study at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/6/617. For more information, contact Erica Rule, AOML Communications Director, at erica.rule@noaa.gov.

Paper on how the regions closest to the surface changed during the landfall of Hurricane Irene in 2011 released online in The Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

Summary: Objects on land and the land itself cause wind to be weaker at the surface than above due to friction.  In hurricanes, the strongest wind occurs where friction is no longer important, near the top of a region we call the boundary layer.  Some people live close to the surface, but others live in …

HRD Monthly Science Meeting of May 2020

May's science meeting consisted of six presentations: Michael Fischer: An examination of local shear, vortex tilt, and tropical cyclone intensity change using airborne radar observations Erica Bower: Towards an Automated Approach to Analyzing Extreme Precipitation and Tropical Cyclones Hua Leighton: Ice Particle Size Distributions from Composites of Microphysics Observations Collected in Tropical Cyclones Laura Ko: …

Article about flying the Coyote drone in hurricanes on the cover of the February 2020 issue of BAMS

You can read more about this study and access the research article at https://noaahrd.wordpress.com/2019/11/25/braving-the-eye-of-the-storm-research-from-drone-penetration-of-hurricane-eyewall-published/.

HRD Monthly Science Meeting of April 2020

April's science meeting consisted of four presentations: Xiaomin Chen -  "Evaluation of PBL schemes using a simple method of large-eddy simulations" Nicholas Foukal (WHOI) -  "Air-sea fluxes in the North Atlantic during extreme wind conditions" Andrew Hazelton - "Exploration of the Early Track and Intensity Uncertainty in Hurricane Dorian Using a HAFS Ensemble"  Frank Marks - "Pioneering …

Paper on how Hurricane Michael (2018) intensified rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico released online in Monthly Weather Review

Weather forecasters use computer models to make predictions. These forecasts of the future depend on knowing what is happening now, what we call initial conditions. However, we can't measure the weather at every location on earth all the time, so we don't know exactly what these initial conditions are. Therefore, we run forecast models many …

AOML laboratory review, 2019 hurricane season review, and other news in the latest AOML Keynotes

Read about these topics at https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Nov-Dec-2019-Keynotes.pdf.

HRD at the American Meteorological Society Centennial Meeting

HRD scientists recently attended the 100th American Meteorological Society Meeting in Boston. There, they presented 33 oral presentations and 10 posters. Left to right: Mu-Chich Ko, Andrew Kren, Joe Cione, Karina Apodaca, Michael Mueller, Sarah Ditchek, Steve Diaz, Jonathan Zawislak, Andy Hazelton, Lisa Bucci, Frank Marks, Shirley Murillo, Xuejin Zhang, John Cortinas, Eric Uhlhorn, and …

Paper on the intensification of tropical cyclones in wind shear published in Mausam

Hurricanes are fed by energy from the warm ocean. The center of a hurricane is surrounded by tall clouds, called cumulus clouds, that produce the heat needed to keep the spin, what we call vorticity, in the hurricanes going. When there are a lot of cumulus clouds around the hurricane's center, the hurricane spins more rapidly. However, …