Dive into the science and observational tech that helps us research and predict severe weather—including hurricanes—with the scientists that make those innovations possible. Dr. Steve Thur gives us an inside look into how NOAA Research studies scientific phenomena from the deepest depths of the ocean to the stars above.
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Transcript
[Planet NOAA theme music plays]
SYMONE BARKLEY (HOST): Welcome back to Planet NOAA. I’m your host, Symone Barkley. Today, we’re diving into the science and observational tech that shapes our understanding of severe weather—with the scientists that make those innovations possible.
[NOAA in the News theme music plays]
HOST: I’m here with Public Affairs Specialist and Climate Scientist Tom DiLiberto—and Tom, a lot has gone down since we last chatted about NOAA in the News. Can you walk me through what’s been going on in the NOAAverse?
TOM DILIBERTO: Yes—and thanks for having me back, Symone. Hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall and left some serious trails of destruction in their respective wakes. In the weeks, days and hours leading up to landfall, NOAA scientists and meteorologists were hard at work collecting storm data and delivering lifesaving forecasts to Americans. If you’ve spent any time on social media over the last month, you’ve likely seen videos of our brave Hurricane Hunter pilots swooping in and out of the eyes of Helene and Milton offsite link.
HOST: I have no idea how they do what they do. Hurricane Milton now holds the record for the Gulf’s strongest late-season storm, so if you’re listening from an impacted area, we’re grateful that you’re safe and able to join us.
DILIBERTO: NOAA’s hurricane forecasts do help shape those lifesaving preparation and evacuation orders that come from your local officials. During hurricanes, NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft fly directly into the eye of the storm to gather critical data that helps improve forecasts. We’ve discussed tools like dropsondes and tail doppler radar, which have been used for years to paint a clear picture of the strength and structure of the storm. But parts of the storm are too dangerous for humans to monitor directly, so uncrewed tools help fill in the blanks. During Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the Hurricane Hunters deployed a lightweight drone called the Black Swift S0, which is breaking new ground…or in this case, air. As the drone collected data in Helene’s boundary layer, which is where the atmosphere meets the ocean within a tropical cyclone, it remained aloft for a record total of 105 minutes with a max range of 166 nautical miles. During Hurricane Milton, the Black Swift, which only weighs 3 lbs, battled record winds of 240mph at a height of 500m above the ocean surface to relay information to our scientists on the ground. The real-time hurricane data on pressure, temperature, humidity and wave height that was collected throughout 16 Black Swift deployments this year could help forecasters and emergency managers understand real-time storm conditions and apply them to future lifesaving forecasts.
HOST: I want to give a special thank you to all of our scientists and meteorologists that hold down the fort in times like these—some of whom I think we’ll hear from later! Remember, you can visit noaa.gov/hurricane to prep for hurricanes and stay up to date on conditions in your area.
DILIBERTO: And thank you all for listening to me drone on for ten episodes!
[Did You NOAA theme music plays]
HOST: I’m here with Tara Garwood, our NOAA Heritage correspondent and trivia queen. Tara, I’d like to talk a bit about the lifesaving work happening every day at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. Can you tell me a bit about the history of the NHC?
TARA GARWOOD: Absolutely. The NHC was founded nearly 70 years ago in 1955 as a branch of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, or NCEP. Back in the ‘50s, hurricane data was transmitted via telephone circuits with teletype machines, and you could call up the National Hurricane Center to get up-to-date hurricane information. In 1980, the NHC facility set up a local amateur radio station that would activate whenever a hurricane was within 300 miles of landfall in certain regions. People could then share eyewitness accounts of what they were experiencing during a hurricane with forecasters. Today, the NHC continues to issue trusted hurricane watches, warnings and forecasts. Your local meteorologist’s hurricane forecasts, as well as the evacuation orders you might hear from local officials, are based on data from NHC scientists. We’ll hear from one of those scientists right after this.
[Roundtable theme music plays]
HOST: As storms begin to feel more frequent and unpredictable, we’re turning to the experts to break down the science behind severe weather—and the tools that help us study, forecast and protect Americans from these once-in-a-lifetime events. I’m here with Dr. Sean Waugh, a research meteorologist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. Dr. Waugh specializes in many different types of severe weather, including tornadoes, lightning, hail, hurricanes, severe winds, and flooding, and even a bit of Hollywood consulting. Sean, excited to hear about that later—thanks for being here!
DR. SEAN WAUGH: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
HOST: We’re also joined by Bill Bunting, Deputy Director of the Storm Prediction Center, or SPC, a division of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Norman, Oklahoma. During his 39-year career with the National Weather Service, Bill has worked at numerous Weather Forecast Offices prior to joining SPC. As a native of Virginia Beach, an early experience with a hurricane led to a life-long interest in meteorology and the desire to work at NOAA. Bill, looking forward to hearing a bit more about that story in a moment—and welcome!
BILL BUNTING: Symone, great to be with you.
HOST: Also with us today is Kathleen Bailey, the Observation and Prediction Branch Chief at the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System Office, also known as IOOS. She oversees a portfolio of programs that collect oceanographic observations from IOOS regional observing platforms, such as Underwater Profiling Gliders and High Frequency Radars that measure surface currents, with a goal of connecting regional observations to end users and numerical circulation models. Thanks for joining us, Kathy!
KATHLEEN BAILEY: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
HOST: Lastly, we’re joined by Dan Lindsey, the GOES-R Program Scientist serving as the primary science authority for the program. Dan is also the GeoXO Deputy Program Scientist and the GeoXO Imager Instrument Scientist. His research interests include remote sensing of mesoscale phenomena, especially convective storms, cloud physics, and algorithm development. Prior to the launch of GOES-R, he helped lead an evaluation of the utility of one-minute imagery from GOES-14 by the National Weather Service. Dan—excited to hear from you today!
DAN LINDSEY: Thank you, Symone. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
HOST: Many of the folks at NOAA have shared incredibly moving stories about how they got involved in researching severe weather. What drew you to a career in studying our planet?
WAUGH: Yeah. So my earliest memory, actually; as a child, my grandfather had a farm in central Kansas. And he got really stressed out one night; used some pretty colorful language in the direction of the meteorologist because he was worried about hail; said meteorologists were wrong and he didn’t know why he listened to them. And I stood up at, like, four years old, and said, “I’m going to be a meteorologist and I’m going to be right someday.” And he said, “You’re going to make a lot of money because you’re going to be the only one.” And it’s something that’s stuck with me since then. I’ve been passionate about the weather and just really striving to understand all of the different aspects of everything that we feel and experience around us.
BUNTING: My interest in meteorology actually goes back to when I was nine years old. A hurricane affected the area where I grew up in southeast Virginia. And I remember being just amazed at how every aspect of society basically paused as the storm approached, as information was shared, and everyone did whatever they could to be ready for the storm. And I remember thinking, this is an incredible force of nature; I would love to play a role someday in the process by which these events are forecast, and how we get information out to the public. And, from that day on, when I was nine years old, this is what I wanted to do. And I’ve been incredibly fortunate that it’s worked out.
BAILEY: Yeah, I can’t remember when my fascination first started. I feel like I’ve always been fascinated by thunderstorms. And I remember when I was little, during thunderstorms, I used to hide under the kitchen table with my fingers stuffed in my ears. So I obviously have gotten over that. But at age 14, the movie “Twister” came out, and I believe I was probably one of a large cadre of folks that were pretty inspired by that movie to pursue a career in meteorology and Earth science. I just found it so fun, and it was just fascinating to see how the movie portrayed tornadoes and severe storms and all of the work that goes into improving predictions.
LINDSEY: Like the other panelists, it does seem like this is something that happened to me in childhood. I grew up in Georgia in the early 1990s, and there were back-to-back years of significant weather events. The first was the storm of the century in March of 1993; 16 inches of snow in North Georgia. And since that day, I’ve loved snow. And then secondly, not as fun, and one year later, the Palm Sunday Tornadoes of 1994 resulted in nine fatalities in my home county. And that was a really sobering event that really made me want to study the weather.
HOST: Dan and Bill, it’s really challenging when storms hit so close to home, so I really admire how those storms became catalysts for you both to get involved in this crucial work. Kathy, a ton of our meteorologists reference “Twister” as the spark that lit their fire, so to speak, so you’re in good company! And Sean, I’ve got to say that I think we all have a relative like your grandpa. We love them, but we’ve got to prove them wrong! And thank you all for sharing your origin stories, as I like to call them. I want to talk about some of the mysteries of severe and seemingly unpredictable weather. What are some of the biggest questions that you’re asking about severe weather in your work, and what tools are you using to answer those questions?
BUNTING: We are often asked at the Storm Prediction Center, “Can you forecast exactly which communities will be affected by severe storms, or even a strong tornado, for more than just a couple of hours in advance?: And the answer is, at the moment we can’t, but we are taking advantage of a new generation of computer models known as CAMs, or convective allowing models, that will allow us with greater specificity to forecast not only the timing of severe storms, but also to forecast the intensity of those severe weather events. And at the moment, we still can’t tell you exactly which neighborhoods or towns will be affected. But we’re getting more and more specific with regard to timing and intensity such that people can make decisions and hopefully keep themselves well informed, and ultimately safe, during severe weather season.
WAUGH: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll jump in next. I think a great follow up to that point is that we understand a lot about the large-scale conditions that are supportive of tornadoes, but we really haven’t been able to narrow down exactly why one storm will produce a tornado and one won’t, even though they’re in the same environment, or why there’s so much disparity between the intensity or the size or the duration of tornadoes. And we use a lot of different tools to try to observe the environment and understand that. Things like our mobile mesonet systems that take surface observations; we launch weather balloons so we get vertical observations of different parts of the atmosphere. We’re even using drones and advanced mobile radar techniques to try to really get observations in unique environments, especially near the ground, to try to understand how these really complex structures form and then ultimately lead to the damage that we all experience as humans.
BAILEY: So my program coordinates NOAA and IOOS partners to investigate how the ocean influences hurricanes. We know that hurricanes get their strength from warm ocean waters, so it’s really vital that we know what the ocean is doing and how much heat the ocean’s providing well ahead of the storm’s approach to the US coastline so that we can then produce an accurate hurricane intensity forecast. Studies have shown that certain ocean features can impact hurricane intensity; like, eddies are probably the most famous example. The loop current, the Gulf Stream; we’ve seen those features lead to rapid intensification events where a storm will increase over 35 miles an hour over a 24 hour period. But then there are other features, like cold pools that sit on the bottom of the coastal ocean. If they get mixed up to the surface ahead of the storm, they can actually sap the storm strength. So the research questions that our partners are exploring are, how do important ocean features and processes within the subsurface ocean influence the amount of available warm water at the surface, and how can we track those features and processes? So, one tool that we’ve been using is underwater profiling gliders. We have a variety of ocean observing platforms that help us answer those questions. The gliders are uniquely suited because we can steer them to track and monitor those ocean features as they’re shifting and moving. Basically, gliders are just underwater robots that we can steer remotely and they move up and down throughout the water column collecting data that helps us monitor.
LINDSEY: My office focuses on satellite observations, specifically geostationary satellites. So really, our biggest challenge from a science standpoint is figuring out how to take that information, which is basically just a series of images, and tell us something useful about a storm, because, I mean, being so far away, these are rather coarse images. You’re seeing individual cumulus clouds, perhaps, but really, you can’t see down onto the individual tornado level. And one big breakthrough has been machine learning, and we’ve been able to take these images and feed them into a machine learning model, and have it tell us things like, what is the likelihood that lightning will occur over the next hour? Or maybe, what does a radar image look like given the cloud information for places that we don’t have radar, like over the open ocean? So it’s really an exciting area of research.
HOST: Thank you all. Bill, like you mentioned earlier, I think we’ve really seen society “pause” in the face of storms this year. Along with the tools that you’ve already covered for us, how is the Storm Prediction Center working directly with communities to support public safety and emergency decision making? And how do the SPC folks ensure that its lifesaving predictions are actually reaching the people that need them?
BUNTING: We work continuously with 116 local National Weather Service forecast offices. They typically have the first line relationships with elected officials; broadcast meteorologists; emergency decision makers. And so we work closely with them to make sure that information is shared not only in a timely fashion, but also as clearly as possible. And for that reason, we’ve worked closely with social scientists and communications experts, really, for 15 years or even longer, making sure that the words, colors and numbers that we use to communicate risk [are] well understood and folks know what to do with that information. We’re also working very closely to refine our forecasts. We’re fortunate here to have the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed, which is an amazing facility that brings together modelers, researchers, forecasters to test cutting edge technologies to make sure that we’re working collaboratively to advance the science and ultimately…the quality of information that can be provided to people in the path of a severe storm.
HOST: Thanks, Bill. And I also want to shout you out for acknowledging the social science and communications aspect of this. It’s one thing to produce those forecasts, but it’s a whole other beast to communicate them effectively in a way that, A, reaches people and, B, encourages them to take action.
BUNTING: Many of our meteorologists that apply for jobs here also have either a minor or a dual degree in social science. And we find that pairing of a physical science and the social science really positions them well for a future where it’s not just about getting the phenomena forecast correctly, but also the potential impacts in communicating that clearly.
HOST: It is absolutely key; I couldn’t agree more. I want to talk briefly about one of the types of storms that the SPC forecasts. I know y’all heard Kathy mention the original “Twister” movie earlier, but this summer, the nation was swept up in the sequel with some serious “Twisters” fever! Sean, can you tell us a bit more about your involvement with the film? How similar is the “Twisters” tornado tech to that of our real-life storm chasers right here at NSSL?
WAUGH: Absolutely. Yeah. That was actually one of the more fun aspects. I mean, it was all fun, but…something I really cherished in working with the movie was sort of bringing to life some of the equipment that we use in the real world, but putting it on such a big stage that was going to reach so many different people. So with the movie, I actually consulted pretty heavily with the movie; I advised them on types of equipment to use, and, “Put this many antennas on this car. Here’s what a radar image should look like.” You know, actually handpicking a lot of the radar images that you see, or all of the radar images that you see, actually, in the movie; those are real radar data cases from real events. That way we were making sure that we were capturing everything as authentically as possible. And that even went as far as actually building props for the movie. And several of the props that you see, like the equipment racks that are on top of the vehicles, like the storm par trucks, for example, those are actual racks that I built in my garage at home that completely mimic the work that we do here at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. It’s the same rack design, it’s just a little bit smaller. So in a lot of ways we were able to actually take real equipment that we use, things like the phased array panels and equipment and technology like that, and put it into that movie world. Now it’s a little exaggerated, and it may not be quite the same way that we use it in the real world, but there is a lot of overlap and a lot of similarity with how the movie depicts things versus how we do things in, you know, the real life.
HOST: [Laughs] What did your family think about you building these Hollywood props in your garage?
WAUGH: I actually didn’t tell very many people because I had to sign an NDA, and Universal Studios is extremely careful about their NDAs. I had multiple people in Universal Studios tell me repeatedly that the weather community is more fanatical about everything weather-related than even the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a compliment or not, but, you know, I took it as that. I didn’t even tell my own mom until like, probably four months before the movie came out, because I was like, you cannot post this on Facebook.
HOST: [Laughs] No posting, Mom! Now, while we’re talking Twisters, I want to direct our focus to hail, which can accompany tornadoes. Sean, thanks to your team’s work, NSSL’s mobile observing vehicle recently got an exciting upgrade. Can you tell us a bit about NSSL’s new Hail Camera, and how it’s helping us understand and predict severe weather hazards?
WAUGH: Absolutely. So hail is actually a really challenging thing to observe. It moves very quickly. It’s very hard. It tends to break everything that it hits. So for decades, all of our observational work on hail has been post impact, where after it stops hailing, you go out, you find the biggest stone you can, and you measure that, and that becomes a single data point for all of the stones that fell. And we know that that’s not the truth of what actually occurred, right? It’s broken. It’s melted. It’s not what fell 20 minutes ago. And this is really critical for folks that work in the warning side of things; for example, knowing what hail looks like on a radar image and how to warn for it, and how to get a better estimate of size, its threat, are all very, very, very important to our warning sort of community. So we need a way to observe hail before it hits anything. So, what we’ve done here at NSSL is built a system capable of doing that. It uses high speed cameras that shoot 4K footage at 330 frames a second. So we get a ton of images in a very short timeframe that we can capture those stones before they have a chance to break or modify in any way. And in order to do that, it needs a ton of light. So the amount of light that we have in the back of the truck is actually brighter than the sun. You need eclipse glasses to look at it if it’s on; it is intensely bright. But that allows us to capture those images of stones in a way that we’ve never been able to do before. And it’s all in the truck, so it’s completely mobile. We can go anywhere we need to with it.
HOST: Honestly, I’m having a hard time comprehending how y’all are just casually popping the brightness of the sun on the back of your truck. I wouldn’t want to be stuck behind you in traffic! [Laughs] Folks, if you want to learn more about the Hail Cam and NSSL’s hail fieldwork, you can visit nssl.noaa.gov. But for now, I want to turn to something that’s been weighing pretty heavily on people’s minds lately. What roles did each of your teams play in predicting, forecasting and communicating about Hurricanes Helene and Milton?
LINDSEY: I think it’s appropriate to talk about satellites first, because hurricanes are formed over the open ocean. And I like to say that geostationary satellites are our eye in the sky with respect to hurricanes, because we don’t have ground-based radar over the open ocean. We really have limited surface observations in general; maybe a few ships and buoys here and there. But for the most part, without geostationary satellites keeping a constant watch, we wouldn’t know really exactly where and when storms are forming and which direction they’re heading. So for both hurricane—really all tropical cyclones—they’re forming in the Atlantic Ocean; our GOES satellites are watching all the time. And for both Milton and Helene, the satellites were used to detect where the storms were forming to give us sort of a pinpoint location. Here is the latitude and longitude of the center of the storm. And here’s the heading. Here’s the direction that it is heading. They’re also used to estimate the intensity of the storm. You use sort of an infrared technique to look at sort of the shapes of the clouds and how cold they are, and that gives forecasters an estimate of how strong they are. All of this information is then fed into numerical models which forecast the direction that they’re heading, and, you know, when they’re going to arrive so that forecasters can suggest evacuations, etcetera.
BUNTING: The Storm Prediction Center is responsible for forecasting tropical cyclone-related tornadoes. And so to do that, we work closely with the National Hurricane Center forecasters. In fact, we speak with them at six hour intervals. Just coordinating our expectations for what we think will happen as a hurricane or tropical storm approaches the coast. Our forecasts go out seven days into the future. And so we’re identifying that threat early as the storm develops and [approaches] the coast. And as it gets closer, we’re refining the forecast, upgrading the potential risk to communities on the path. We will issue a product forecast called a mesoscale convective discussion, which is a bit technical, and then ultimately a tornado watch, typically for several hours in advance, as these are often long duration threats. But all of this is designed to give people in the affected areas as much heads-up as possible to prepare for yet another dimension of a hurricane. It’s not just surge and wind and flooding, but also a tornado threat, as we’ve unfortunately seen lately.
WAUGH: Yeah. And from the National Severe Storms Laboratory perspective, as we focus more on the understanding and research side, our sort of role in hurricanes—which a lot of people don’t think, you know, being from Oklahoma, that we do hurricane research—we’re focused on trying to understand how those environments work and really inform some of the decisions that our counterparts at, say, SPC, for example, are using that information to try to make those tornado watches right? Because having events that produce some of the prolific tornadoes, like we saw in Milton, for example, we really need to better characterize and understand those events. And then with things like Helene, how the hurricane system is able to transport that much precipitable water inland, and how much change and variation occurs as it makes landfall and transitions from the strong hurricane that it was at the coast, you know, versus inland…there’s a lot of variation and change that goes on there, and a lot of our work is associated with trying to understand that and then use that understanding to create either products or informational tools or even data sets that forecasters can use to try to incorporate that knowledge and use that going forward.
BAILEY: So in IOOS, we have been, for Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, we have had underwater profiling gliders out there monitoring the ocean within the forecast cone, the five day forecast cone. And basically these gliders were collecting temperature and salinity information in the water column and sending that data straight to NOAA for use by the ocean models that feed the hurricane forecasts. We’re constantly trying to help improve the hurricane intensity forecast so that the coastal communities and emergency managers can then prepare and make decisions.
HOST: Kathy, you’ve mentioned that hurricane forecasts rely on an accurate representation of the ocean, but there’s still a shortage of subsurface ocean data. How is IOOS filling this gap?
BAILEY: Yeah, this is really the crux of what we do. I mentioned that we’re tracking and monitoring ocean features that influence hurricane intensity. The ocean models struggle with those features because they’re dynamic in nature. And also, just as you mentioned, we have very limited subsurface observations available to the models. We have an enormous amount of surface information thanks to satellites. But underneath the surface we don’t know as much about what’s going on. So we’re using underwater gliders to help fill this data gap. They look like torpedoes with wings, except they don’t have a propeller. They very slowly move up and down throughout the water column in a sawtooth pattern, collecting data from sensors that are attached, and they change their depth by adjusting their weight. They pull water in to sink, and then they push water out to float back to the surface. And when they surface, they send those data back to NOAA through IOOS. We can keep gliders out for weeks and months at a time, diving up to 3000 ft. And they send those data back to NOAA multiple times per day, so that’s useful for the models. I do want to emphasize we’re not chasing storms with gliders. They are way too slow for that. You can basically walk faster than a glider moves horizontally. Instead, we position them in the coastal ocean, kind of guarding the U.S. coastline in U.S. waters to monitor those ocean conditions so that by the time a storm does inevitably approach the coast, we have a great representation of the ocean in the models that are used by the forecasts.
HOST: Slow and steady wins the race! Kathy, what are some other ways that IOOS uses subsurface ocean observations?
BAILEY: So, the benefits of ocean observations are, of course, numerous. I’ve been talking about the improvements to hurricane intensity forecasts. Beyond that, more broadly speaking, they support weather prediction, fisheries management, maritime safety in ports, tourism and recreation, like boating and fishing. And we can track and monitor coastal hazards like harmful algal blooms and marine heatwaves that have major impacts on local ecosystems. Beyond that, we also contribute observations for search and rescue; oil spill response. They help local fisheries manage their operations. And of course, we are using observations over longer timescales to monitor climate change.
HOST: That long-term data collection is so crucial when it comes to studying climate change—whether it’s being observed in the ocean or from the stars. Dan, this year, we’ve gotten to talk a lot on the podcast about the exciting updates we’ve seen with the GOES-R satellite series. What are some of the applications that are relying on this key GOES-R data as input?
LINDSEY: So GOES-R ultimately is really just providing images. And so how do you take those images and use them in some quantitative way? Forecasters use the imagery daily. They look at the images; they see clouds move. They’re able to sort of pinpoint in the clouds that may form into thunderstorms or may form into a hurricane, etc., using their eyes; it’s sort of their own brains that are doing this. And that type of application is really ideal for machine learning. If you take all those images and you feed them into a machine learning model, you can then see if the computer is able to sort of recognize those same patterns and say, okay, this cloud may be the one that forms into a new storm. A specific example of an application that is using this type of technology is something called LightningCast offsite link. It was developed by some partners at the University of Wisconsin. And what it does is it takes images from the GOES-R satellite, and it predicts, what is the probability that there’s going to be lightning in that area within the next 60 minutes? Let’s say that you are at an outdoor sporting event, say, in Florida, somewhere that gets a lot of lightning. And at the moment the skies are completely clear. But what this model will tell you is, maybe there’s a storm that’s getting ready to form a little bit further to the west or away from the outdoor sporting event. And the model may then tell you, okay, there’s a 40% chance that this area where this outdoor event is occurring will see lightning. And as a decision maker, they then have a piece of information. Do we need to take action? Do we need to clear the stands? Maybe they wait until the probability gets a little bit higher. Maybe they wait till it gets to 70% and they say okay, let’s clear the stands. Let’s get everybody to safety. And this is some really cool technology that is just becoming operational within NOAA here within the next year or two.
HOST: Dan, that’s a really cool application. Last month, we were able to chat with Dr. Stephen Volz about some of the exciting new instruments and capabilities on the GOES-19 satellite. Even as these innovations are being rolled out right now, we’re looking ahead to the future of geostationary observations. Can you tell me a bit about the GeoXO program and how it’ll update our severe weather monitoring and imaging capabilities?
LINDSEY: Yeah, as amazing as the current images are that we get from our GOES-R series, they can be better. And that’s what we’re doing with the GeoXO. GeoXO stands for Geostationary Extended Observations. And this is NOAA’s future geostationary satellite program that will provide observations from the early 2030s all the way out to the 2050s. It takes a long time to plan and build these satellites using all of this high-tech stuff. And so we have to start planning early. We started planning for the GeoXO program in about 2019, and we’re planning for the first launch in 2032. So it does take some time. In the imager—that’s the instrument I’ve been talking about that provides the really high-resolution looks at clouds—we’re going to be improving the spatial resolution in the visible channels by a factor of four. That means we can see clouds that are four times smaller. And really a neat application is the ability to see fires or to detect hotspots associated with wildfires that are four times smaller. And what this means is we’ll be able to potentially detect the fire from satellite before anybody notices the fire is burning in a remote area, and alert emergency managers and have them go out and perhaps put out the fire. In addition to weather imagery, we’re really expanding to include oceans, coasts and climate by adding some new instruments. One is…something called an ocean color instrument, and that way, we can do things like do a much better job of detecting and tracking harmful algal blooms. We also have an atmospheric composition instrument. This is an instrument that measures air quality constituents, things like NO₂ [Nitrogen Dioxide] and ozone near the surface. And then finally, another weather-focused instrument is something called a hyperspectral infrared sounder. And what that does is give us an estimate of the vertical profiles of temperature and water vapor. That information is then fed into the models to do a better job of forecasting things like severe storms, or storms that may produce tornadoes.
HOST: Fascinating stuff, Dan. 2030 may seem like a long time away, but with the way this year has flown by, we’ll be seeing those new detection instruments in action sooner than you might think. Folks can stay up to date on the GeoXO program at nesdis.noaa.gov/geoxo. To close us out today, I want to hear one thing you each want folks to know about how NOAA combines air, land and sea observations to research, predict and forecast severe weather conditions.
BUNTING: A lot of people are working extremely hard to better understand the atmosphere, its interactions with the oceans; to provide the tools that allow meteorologists and other scientists to predict these hazards. But a really important part of the entire equation of keeping folks informed and safe is the individual actions that people in threatened areas need to take to develop a severe weather plan, have multiple ways of receiving warnings, because in the end, the best forecast, if it doesn’t get to the people that are most affected, is less useful than we’d like it to be. And so, you’ve heard a bit about all the great work that’s being done across NOAA. We really want people to use this information, to use it effectively, to make informed decisions that hopefully lead to the right course of action. But really, there’s a part that each of us have to play when the day comes that we are personally in the path of a dangerous storm.
BAILEY: I really appreciate what Bill just said, that there are a lot of people working really hard on these questions, and in my world, we have a breadth of partners who I referred to earlier. We’re all working together and coordinating across different sectors. It’s not even just NOAA, it’s also the US Navy. It’s academics. So everyone’s working together to help contribute and improve ocean observations for hurricane forecast improvements. And we’re gathering all of this information from 3,000 ft down below the surface up to the storm at the flight level of the Hurricane Hunter…collecting that sort of 3D picture of what’s going on. And that’s going to be really valuable for research as well as the operations.
WAUGH: Man, I mean, it’s tough to follow those answers. Those are really good answers. I mean, taking action is…I agree with Bill, is probably one of the most important things. I think the only other thing that I would stress is that oftentimes we tend to oversimplify things. These environments that we’re trying to study are incredibly complex structures. There’s a lot of different scales that are kind of combining together. So it’s oftentimes not as simple as just going out and collecting one or two observations and then solving, you know, all of all of the things that tell us about tornadoes. It’s kind of like putting a puzzle together, right? But in this case, we don’t really know what the whole picture is supposed to look like. So a lot of times, we’re still searching for the right pieces, and that’s why we use and why we need to use so many different types of equipment, whether that’s ocean observations, or satellite observations, surface observations. All these things tell us how the atmosphere is working in a different way at different scales. And only by combining that information can we really understand things. And that’s why we see some of the uncertainty and the variability in some of our forecasts, because we don’t have all of the answers to a lot of these. But it is something that we’re working on. And, you know, we’re trying to get better at understanding how these things work so that we can provide a better forecast to everybody.
LINDSEY: I mean, I firmly agree that, you know, we can do the best we can at providing guidance. But ultimately, you know, it’s that last step, like Bill said, what do we need to do to have people actually take action, protect themselves, protect their property, etc. is a key question that we need to work on.
HOST: I like that, Dan! Leaving us with a big-picture question to chew on. Thank you all so much for joining us today. I want to take this time to remind folks that you can visit noaa.gov/hurricane to learn more about the steps you need to take to be prepared for a hurricane in your area. Plus, you can revisit Episode 4 of the Planet NOAA Podcast, which is called “Into the eye of the storm,” to get your hurricane kit together with the help of our experts.
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HOST: Welcome back, Tara. What’s it like to actually forecast a hurricane?
GARWOOD: It’s no easy feat, that’s for sure. Let’s take Hurricane Andrew as an example. In 1992, the NHC facilities were damaged by the Category 5 hurricane while the meteorologists inside were forecasting it. Here’s what former NHC Deputy Director Dr. Edward Rappaport shared about forecasting Hurricane Andrew with the NOAA Voices Oral History project:
DR. EDWARD RAPPAPORT: Hurricane Andrew was the first category five hurricane to hit this country in almost twenty-five years and the first that had hit South Florida in almost sixty years. But there’s an added stress when not only are you forecasting a Category Four or Five hurricane to hit the United States, but you’re forecasting for it to hit your own community, because you have to prepare your own family and home, at the same time as trying to keep your focus on your work. As we were getting close to the storm making landfall, it was also right about the time that we were issuing our updated forecast with all the associated – what we call – advisories and products at 5:00 AM. We were so focused on that that I didn’t realize until afterward when somebody told me that the building was swaying back and forth. We were on the sixth floor of a twelve-story building. As that was going on, the cover for the radar that was on the roof blew off. There were cars flying around in the parking lot. In fact, just about that time, one of my colleagues from the Miami Weather Forecast Office walked over and said, “We just had a gust here,” and showed me the chart, and it was 164 miles per hour. It’s interesting because years later, someone I knew from the field said that they found it interesting how I then sent out a short message, which apparently was very terse – not negative, but very succinct and brief. It said something to the effect of, “National Weather Service has experienced a wind 12 gust of 164 miles per hour and the radar is not operational.” What they thought was amusing about that was that those are real dramatic outcomes, but it was just…no fluff in it. Just report the facts and move on.
GARWOOD: That large gust of wind—and other hurricane impacts—severely damaged those original NHC facilities at One Gables Tower in Miami. The National Hurricane Center actually had to relocate to Florida International University, where they continue their lifesaving work today.
HOST: I want to give a special shoutout to our folks at the National Hurricane Center for their work before, during and after Helene and Milton. As a reminder, you can find the most up-to-date information on hurricane watches, warnings and key messages at noaa.gov/hurricanes.
GARWOOD: And try to make sure you have multiple ways to receive weather warnings and important instructions from local officials—whether that’s through your phone, television, or a NOAA weather radio. We’ll be back with more right after this.
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HOST: Let’s visit the Leadership Corner. I’m excited to be speaking with Dr. Steve Thur, the Assistant Administrator for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, also known as NOAA Research or OAR for short. He oversees the operations of ten labs and six scientific programs, guiding the application of OAR’s expertise, data and tools to better understand and preserve our planet. Steve’s career with NOAA has focused on applying service through science in order to manage, restore, and conserve marine resources. Steve, thank you for being here today!
DR. STEVE THUR: Symone, I’m really excited for our conversation. Thank you so much for the invitation.
HOST: Steve, talk to me a bit about your professional background. How did you find your way into marine science?
THUR: Absolutely. So I’ve been drawn to the ocean my entire life. And so academically, my areas of interest were on the use of sustainable financing mechanisms for marine conservation. And when one comes out with a Ph.D. in marine science, NOAA is a very clear employer of choice. And I found my way directly to the agency following graduate school.
HOST: That’s a great intersection—marine science and economics can get pretty entangled. I’m sure you found that to be true during your time at NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, or NCCOS. Can you tell us about some of the unique challenges facing coastal communities today? How can we build up healthy coastal environments and economies to sustain the residents that depend upon them?
THUR: So I think that this is one of the challenges of our era. Folks have been drawn to the coast, at least in our country, for decades, and it provides a specific kind of lifestyle. There are specific livelihoods available along the coast. We choose to live there, to raise our families there. We choose to recreate along the coast. And today, what we’re seeing is that the environmental hazards are perhaps becoming more frequent than they were in the past, and they are impacting coastal communities more frequently than elsewhere. And so we have this conundrum of a large body of our population, perhaps up to 40% of the U.S. population living in coastal counties, that are at increasing risk, largely due to weather and climate-driven hazards. So, how do we as a science agency look to address this conundrum? From my perspective, what we want to do is for us to use our physical science expertise to assess risk and to communicate that risk so that folks can be more informed, perhaps, than they are right now. The second thing I think we have to do is to broaden the aperture of what we have traditionally viewed as NOAA’s role, going beyond the biophysical sciences and to incorporate more social science research. So not only studying the environment along the coast, but studying our human populations that have chosen to live there. And I think if we do that, we’re going to be able to reach folks with the science we’re producing in new ways. So what does that mean for how we promote a healthy coastal environment and the economies? I really do believe—and this is part of my mantra, service through science—that if we’re able to more effectively convey our understanding of the natural world to those that are living along the coast, they’re going to be able to make better informed decisions. And that can look like everything from individual family decisions, like, where do we choose to live? What house, what neighborhood are we looking at? …to local government decisions. Where do we locate a hospital or the fire station to ensure that it isn’t flooded, and that those services can be provided in an emergency to our residents? So, that’s how I think we can provide a pretty significant impact to our coastal communities.
HOST: So, like you’re saying, it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of answer.
THUR: It is one thing to reach the 330 million citizens of our country; it is another to reach perhaps 6,000 local government units. And the decisions that the 330 million are making are very different than the decisions the 6,000 are making. And so I believe we have a duty to tailor the information to the specific decision makers that we are trying to inform through our science. And so that may look very, very different for those populations. Maybe it’s additional GIS layers. Maybe it’s specific modeling code that they can run themselves. So it’s a pretty broad spectrum, and I think that’s one of our big challenges.
HOST: I think OAR and our other divisions at NOAA are doing a good job of taking new tech and using it to reach different folks in different ways. We might be issuing disaster prep tips to the public on social media, and at the same time, distributing those modeling codes or GIS layers to local decision makers. Either way, OAR provides all of these different groups with a best-in-class scientific research foundation in order for us to better understand our ocean planet. What do some of these different types of research and fieldwork at OAR look like, and how do those insights become integrated into NOAA’s operational work?
THUR: So, I think one of the fascinating aspects of NOAA Research is the breadth of work that we do. We have structured our research into three very broad areas: climate, weather, and oceans, coasts and Great Lakes; that’s the third. Now, one of the challenges that we have is that if we are to truly understand our Earth system, we can’t separate weather from climate. We can’t separate the oceans from how they influence the weather. And so we very much do view the work that we do as part of a holistic effort to understand the Earth system, even though we have these three distinct portfolios of research. Honestly, it’s probably covering the full breadth of the kinds of science one can do. We have staff that are on ships a good fraction of the year. We have individuals working at laboratories doing bench chemistry. We have individuals that are flying in NOAA and partner’s planes collecting atmospheric observations. We have individuals that are stationed in some of the most remote corners of the globe. We have staff at the South Pole station—Utqiagvik, previously known as Barrow—in the very northern slopes of Alaska. We have individuals in American Samoa in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, collecting pure air samples. And so the kinds of research we are able to do, and what one does on a day-to-day basis, are tremendously variable across NOAA Research. How do we feed this into operational offices? The most clear example of that is the work we do on developing weather models feeding into the National Weather Service’s operational forecast system. So a lot of the research that goes into improving our weather forecasts, and this could be everything from predicting hurricanes to tornado warnings to addressing fire weather issues, which are becoming more prominent as we have drier atmosphere and more heat occurring in certain areas of our country. The pipeline of OAR-developed research breakthroughs into the Weather Service is long and it’s fairly robust. However, we do feed into other operational offices, including NOAA Fisheries, often through some of our oceanic modeling, and the National Ocean Service, where we help with some of the oceanographic products that go into national marine sanctuary management, for example.
HOST: Ok, shoutout to the Ocean Service. I’m in the Ocean Service, so I’ve got to plug them. Steve, speaking of the hurricane prediction research you mentioned, our panel of weather, climate and ocean experts did a fantastic job of unpacking their work on severe storms. Can you give us an overview of the ongoing hurricane research and fieldwork happening at OAR?
THUR: So our Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, also known as HFIP, was started in 2007, and it was originated from the very impactful storms we had a couple of years before that. Hurricane Charley in 2004, and then the trio of Wilma, Katrina and Rita in 2005. And there was a recognition that if we were able to improve our forecasting of tropical cyclones, we could have a significant impact on everyday lives in our country. And so we created the Hurricane Forecast Improvement [Project] at that time to attempt to do a couple of things. One of those was to improve the track accuracy. So could we, 72 hours before landfall, narrow that cone of uncertainty? And what would be the benefit of doing that? We can’t change the path of the hurricane. What is the societal benefit of being able to forecast its track more accurately? And there are two big, big impacts. The first is that for those that are in that narrowed path, the more accurate forecast for track, they have a greater level of confidence that if we forecast it, it is truly going to hit them. And that will likely lead to behavior that we are seeking, which is, they’re taking protective measures 3 or 4 days in advance. The other major impact, and this is one that is probably less recognized, is the benefit that accrues to all of those individuals that are no longer in the forecast cone of uncertainty. So for those that would have been on the edges of that very wide cone 15 years ago, they may have been advised to evacuate. That has a large social, individual and economic impact. And by narrowing this track uncertainty, we’re able to avoid all of those costs and focus effort on the very narrow area that truly needs it. In addition to looking at track improvements, we’ve been working diligently to estimate precipitation, storm surge, and to understand how other events, like tornadoes spawned by tropical cyclones, are going to impact areas that are perhaps directly within the cone, perhaps a little wider than that cone of uncertainty.
HOST: Steve, I know that this work has made a huge difference in the way that evacuation orders are issued, especially recently with Helene and Milton. I think that a major vein that you and I have been following today is that applications of NOAA’s science are so dependent upon the environment in question. In some of our larger cities, for example, even different neighborhoods require different approaches. So how is OAR empowering communities to use NOAA’s scientific insights in the ways that work best for them when it comes to environmental management?
THUR: One of the examples that I wanted to provide is, starting in 2017, I believe, we, through our climate portfolio, have been undertaking urban heat island mapping. So within a single city, there can be pockets where the summertime high temperature is up to 20°F higher than it is elsewhere in that same city. There’s a lot of connection to tree cover, open pavement, and the types of building materials that are used in certain neighborhoods within a city that lead to these variations. What a lot of individuals don’t know is that the weather hazard that causes the greatest number of deaths in the United States each year is not, in a typical year, a hurricane or tornado or flood. It is heat. Heat is the number one weather killer in the United States. By mapping heat islands within individual cities, we are providing a very neighborhood-by-neighborhood look at the additional risk certain populations have. That information is key for city managers—not us at the federal level, but at the municipality level—to take that to decide, okay, is there something here? Are we seeing [a] greater number of emergency room visits than we would have otherwise from these neighborhoods? If so, how can we help our residents? What can we do? It may be cooling centers in certain neighborhoods at peak times of the year. It might be that we have to look at replacing tree cover. So this is an example of how data has been used to identify additional human health risk. And we’re working that into decision making structures at the local levels.
HOST: Oh, I really love that example. I live in Baltimore and our city government is just starting to put in a ton of new initiatives to keep people cool on really hot days. They’re sending out heat risk alerts and they’re also putting cooling centers in neighborhoods like mine where there isn’t a lot of tree cover. Steve, to put it lightly, our nation’s future holds some uncertainty. How does NOAA Research plan to continue providing quality, unbiased scientific insights in the face of a changing political climate?
THUR: My motivation, as a career administrator of science within this agency, is, how can we advance our understanding of the natural world to the benefit of our fellow citizens? And if I keep that front of mind when I’m posed a question like this, the political uncertainties, then I have a touchstone. I have an end goal in mind that is constant, regardless of the political administration of the day. And so when I think about some of our largest challenges, can we provide useful information to just share with some of the cities in the West and the agricultural sector about whether they’re going to have enough water for their cities and the agricultural sector in two or three or ten years? That’s going to be a challenge regardless of the political party that is in power. When I think about emergency response following natural disasters, how can we forecast those more accurately and further in advance to allow pre-positioning to occur? That’s not a red or blue state issue. That is not something we’re going to suddenly stop working on or start working on based upon the political administration of the day. I also point out that there is a set of fundamental research that we have been conducting for decades that should continue regardless of the party that is in power. It is from these long term data sets that we’re able to discern short term variation that’s natural from longer term trends. And so there are a suite of foundational research activities that NOAA has been conducting for decades that should persist regardless of the short term administration of the day.
HOST: Steve, that’s definitely reassuring to hear. Thanks so much for joining us today.
THUR: I am super excited about the work that our staff are doing. Love the ability through this podcast, Symone, to share a little bit about that with others. So thank you for providing me the opportunity.
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HOST: I’m back with Tara Garwood. Tara, as our guests have discussed today, it’s not just about the latest toys and tech. We could have the most accurate forecast possible and it might not make a difference if there was nobody to share it.
GARWOOD: It doesn’t matter how good your forecast is if you can’t communicate it clearly. Let’s take a listen to what Ed Rappaport had to say about the value that science communicators add to the field, and how challenging that work can actually be:
RAPPAPORT: They are familiar with the strengths and weaknesses, the biases of individual models. Yes, the computer models are much better than they used to be. The hope is they’ll continue to get better and drive us forward. But beyond that, there’s even advanced skill that’s added by the forecasters. I, as many of my colleagues in this field, am more introverted than extroverted, and never saw myself as being a TV meteorologist. That just wasn’t going to be for me. In fact, when I first got here, I remember a day in the first year or two where somebody had [a] call from a radio station wanting to speak to one of the hurricane forecasters. I wasn’t a forecaster yet, but I was helping them out. So the forecaster who was on duty – maybe they had something else they needed to do – asked if I would take the call. Giving an interview on air was not something I was comfortable doing. That’s where I’ve had to learn to be outside of my comfort zone over the years, learn to give these kinds of interviews and television interviews, and now something over, like, 1,500 interviews I’ve given, so…
HOST: Glad to hear Ed shining the spotlight on our meteorologists. You know, during Helene and Milton, I’ve seen folks resharing local forecasts and referencing their favorite meteorologists on the air.
GARWOOD: Yes! I’m really happy to see the outpouring of support for the folks that work so hard to bring us the information we need to stay safe during these disasters. Remember, you can visit hurricanes.gov to keep up with hurricane watches and warnings. And you can hear more from Ed and other hurricane experts in the NOAA Heritage Collection of the NOAA Voices Oral History project.
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HOST: Thanks for joining us on Planet NOAA, where we prepare people for tomorrow’s planet, today. You can catch up on episodes anytime at noaa.gov/planetnoaa or via your podcatcher of choice.