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Hurricane forecasting

The National Hurricane Center has a suite of about a half-dozen computer models that forecast hurricanes. The models rely on historical storm information, current weather data from within a storm, and predictions about how the atmosphere will change ahead of a storm.

The chaotic nature of the atmosphere causes the models to sometimes make wildly varying predictions, especially in forecast periods beyond twenty-four hours. Real humans monitor the different models; public forecasts are then the product of varying amounts of human intuition mixed with the results of one or more models.

Accurate forecasting relies on a number of factors, including moisture, temperature and wind measurements within the storm and, perhaps most importantly, large-scale steering winds around the storm. Here are some of the data sources:

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES, is in a geostationary orbit above the Earth. It is equipped with an imager and a sounder to profile several horizontal slices of the atmosphere, providing information about temperature, wind movements and cloud heights.

The GOES data is but one element in a vast array of statistical and imaging data that take into account global weather patterns, large pressure differences and wind movements, moisture levels and sea-surface temperatures.

Forecasters use data from some fifty-thousand daily wind readings from jetliners, about four-thousand land stations worldwide, thousands of ships and fixed bouys that measure ocean temperatures, and perishable balloons released twice daily around the world that sample the upper atmosphere. ez

The NHC provides a technical description of the models.

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