thedrifter
10-28-08, 07:54 AM
On the right track
Military and civilian specialists work to improve storm forecasts
By Teri Weaver, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Wednesday, October 29, 2008
TOKYO
Satellites and scientists can pinpoint the precise location of seaborne storms. They can tell us about the wind speeds, the rainfall, the size of the waves — all in real time.
What they can’t do is tell us exactly what will happen next.
Forecasting typhoons and hurricanes accurately and quickly is vital, as victims from Camille, Andrew, Pongsona, Katrina and Ike well know. Yet despite the available technology, forecasters still don’t understand why a storm forms, why it strengthens or weakens, and exactly how strong it will be when it hits land.
This fall, a group of about 200 scientists, pilots, forecasters, students and aircrews from nine countries worked to provide unprecedented research toward those unknowns. For the first time, these military and civilian specialists tracked tropical storms and typhoons in the Pacific from their formation to their last swirl.
"It’s never been done, to follow a storm from the genesis and to the end point," said Dr. Martin Weissmann, a meteorologist and project leader for the team from Germany, which worked out of U.S. Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Japan.
From August through early October, researchers and flight crews were positioned from Taiwan to California to track typhoons as they spun northwestward from their origins near the Philippines and Guam toward the South China Sea, China or out in the northern Pacific Ocean.
The massive, $12 million study began more than a year ago with coordination and support from the United Nations’ weather tracking organization, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, according to Dr. Patrick Harr, a professor of meteorology at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
The team also tested weather satellites and will study that data in real time and in months and years to come, said Harr, lead scientist in the study.
"This is very rare," Harr said during a phone interview. "It won’t happen again for a long, long time. It’s been a logistical challenge to get countries all working together to study these weather events in the western Pacific."
What they know
The difference between a typhoon and a hurricane is location — typhoons rule the western Pacific while hurricanes run the Atlantic region. Yet Pacific weather patterns can affect the entire Northern Hemisphere, Harr said.
Pacific storms typically begin near the Philippines or Guam, Harr said. About half go northwest where they either die in the South China Sea or gain enough fury to hit Hong Kong, southern China or Taiwan.
The others continue on through the South China Sea then flick back northwestward, striking a path toward South Korea, Japan and the northern Pacific Ocean.
It’s those storms, with their extreme mixture of warm and cold fronts, that can push bad weather around the world. It’s as if the waves and winds are attached to a long jump rope, and one strong flick from a typhoon in the Pacific can create flooding in Europe, Harr said.
That’s what the scientists know. What they don’t know is why the storm forms, why it heads for China, or why it flicks back toward Japan.
They don’t even know why, under seemingly similar conditions, a major storm develops only 10 percent of the time, Harr said.
And the actual formation of a typhoon? It hasn’t been observed firsthand, he said. Even in the Atlantic, where U.S. military and government planes track hurricanes by flying through them, they typically wait to cross the storm when it’s closer to landfall, he said.
"It’s not easy to have an airplane there at the exact right moment," Harr said.
Beginning in August, the project put crews in place to try to do just that.
Frequent fliers
Since August, a handful of planes and crews stationed in Guam, Taiwan and Japan have been leapfrogging each other to track the beginning and ending of storms.
Two C-130s and 28 members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron based at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss. — the U.S. Air Force’s Hurricane Hunters — flew out of Guam. A U.S. Navy P-3, on loan from the Office of Naval Research, hopscotched the Pacific. A Taiwanese plane and a German Falcon also flew from China and Japan.
The project’s earliest storm was Nuri. The storm formed in mid-August, and the team debated whether to fly it, Weissmann said. With a relatively calm storm season to that point, they finally decided, "there’s nothing better to do."
It was the right decision. Nuri hit the Philippines on Aug. 20, killing seven people, Agence France-Presse reported. Two days later, it swept into Hong Kong and prompted the island’s strongest storm warning in five years, the news agency reported.
The team ended up flying the storm four times, Harr said. By the end of the project, they flew a multitude of storms, including Sinlaku, which formed near the Philippines on Sept. 7. Two weeks later, the storm had traveled along that flicking jump rope — back to China, then eastward toward Japan and the northern Pacific. It was the storm the researchers had been waiting for.
"We did finish with a bang," Harr wrote in an e-mail last week.
Toward the end of the project, the teams flew the super typhoon Jangmi in late September. During that storm, they dropped a series of weather sensors — drifting buoys — in the path of the typhoon at about the time it reached maximum intensity, Harr wrote. That is another first in weather data collection, he noted.
Even when days were clear, the Air Force crews from Guam still flew during the project, according to Lt. Col. Roy Deatherage, a flight meteorologist and the 53rd’s mission commander for the deployment.
In addition to storm chasing, the U.S., German and Taiwanese planes took weather measurements throughout the region. In the Pacific, weather forecasters get their information from satellites. With so many weather assets around, the team wants to ensure the accuracy of those more automated tracking systems.
Additionally, the Germans are experimenting with a different type of weather sensor, one that replaces radars with lasers that use light to measure wind and water vapor concentration. Weissmann said they hope those laser systems will one day replace radio-wave radars.
Now that the flights have ended, another piece of the project will begin, according to Harr.
The scientists want to collect data from various storms’ lives to create computer simulations. With those models, they hope they can come closer to predicting the severity and life span of a storm, Harr said.
Stars and Stripes reporter Tim Wightman contributed to this story.
T-PARC, the THORPEX Pacific Asian Regional Campaign, is a $12 million, multinational project to study the formation and pathways of storms in the Pacific. The United States is a leading participant, with the National Science Foundation providing the majority of funding. The field portion of the project, Tropical Cyclone Structure-2008, is being paid for by the Office of Naval Research.
T-PARC is a project within THORPEX, a long-term research program organized under the World Meteorological Organization’s World Weather Research Program. The field portion of the project, TCS-08, is financially independent of T-PARC, though it works in tandem with the overall goal of studying the life cycle of tropical cyclones over the western and northern Pacific region.
Nine countries are participating in this season’s storm study, offering money, expertise and time to track storms. They are:
Canada
Providing money for the German aircraft.
China
Providing extra weather observations.
France
Providing the weather balloons, which record data as they fall.
Germany
The German Aerospace Center — known as the DLR — is flying its Falcon aircraft from Japan, tracking storms as they move northward. Also providing university scientists to do analysis and modeling of possible storms.
Japan
Providing coordination and research from the Japan Meteorological Agency.
South Korea
The Korea Meteorological Administration is providing money for the German aircraft and support with the storm modeling.
Taiwan
Using a DOTSTAR aircraft to follow storms, providing money to pay for weather monitors and extra observations.
UK
Working on data analysis to create storm models based on real data.
United States
The lead country in the project, providing headquarters at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.; two Air Force C-130s and members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron to track storms and monitor them from Guam; one Navy P-3 from Maryland to provide the same monitoring throughout the Pacific region; and forecasting at the 17th Operational Weather Squadron at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, to direct teams where to track the storms.
Ellie
Military and civilian specialists work to improve storm forecasts
By Teri Weaver, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Wednesday, October 29, 2008
TOKYO
Satellites and scientists can pinpoint the precise location of seaborne storms. They can tell us about the wind speeds, the rainfall, the size of the waves — all in real time.
What they can’t do is tell us exactly what will happen next.
Forecasting typhoons and hurricanes accurately and quickly is vital, as victims from Camille, Andrew, Pongsona, Katrina and Ike well know. Yet despite the available technology, forecasters still don’t understand why a storm forms, why it strengthens or weakens, and exactly how strong it will be when it hits land.
This fall, a group of about 200 scientists, pilots, forecasters, students and aircrews from nine countries worked to provide unprecedented research toward those unknowns. For the first time, these military and civilian specialists tracked tropical storms and typhoons in the Pacific from their formation to their last swirl.
"It’s never been done, to follow a storm from the genesis and to the end point," said Dr. Martin Weissmann, a meteorologist and project leader for the team from Germany, which worked out of U.S. Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Japan.
From August through early October, researchers and flight crews were positioned from Taiwan to California to track typhoons as they spun northwestward from their origins near the Philippines and Guam toward the South China Sea, China or out in the northern Pacific Ocean.
The massive, $12 million study began more than a year ago with coordination and support from the United Nations’ weather tracking organization, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, according to Dr. Patrick Harr, a professor of meteorology at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
The team also tested weather satellites and will study that data in real time and in months and years to come, said Harr, lead scientist in the study.
"This is very rare," Harr said during a phone interview. "It won’t happen again for a long, long time. It’s been a logistical challenge to get countries all working together to study these weather events in the western Pacific."
What they know
The difference between a typhoon and a hurricane is location — typhoons rule the western Pacific while hurricanes run the Atlantic region. Yet Pacific weather patterns can affect the entire Northern Hemisphere, Harr said.
Pacific storms typically begin near the Philippines or Guam, Harr said. About half go northwest where they either die in the South China Sea or gain enough fury to hit Hong Kong, southern China or Taiwan.
The others continue on through the South China Sea then flick back northwestward, striking a path toward South Korea, Japan and the northern Pacific Ocean.
It’s those storms, with their extreme mixture of warm and cold fronts, that can push bad weather around the world. It’s as if the waves and winds are attached to a long jump rope, and one strong flick from a typhoon in the Pacific can create flooding in Europe, Harr said.
That’s what the scientists know. What they don’t know is why the storm forms, why it heads for China, or why it flicks back toward Japan.
They don’t even know why, under seemingly similar conditions, a major storm develops only 10 percent of the time, Harr said.
And the actual formation of a typhoon? It hasn’t been observed firsthand, he said. Even in the Atlantic, where U.S. military and government planes track hurricanes by flying through them, they typically wait to cross the storm when it’s closer to landfall, he said.
"It’s not easy to have an airplane there at the exact right moment," Harr said.
Beginning in August, the project put crews in place to try to do just that.
Frequent fliers
Since August, a handful of planes and crews stationed in Guam, Taiwan and Japan have been leapfrogging each other to track the beginning and ending of storms.
Two C-130s and 28 members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron based at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss. — the U.S. Air Force’s Hurricane Hunters — flew out of Guam. A U.S. Navy P-3, on loan from the Office of Naval Research, hopscotched the Pacific. A Taiwanese plane and a German Falcon also flew from China and Japan.
The project’s earliest storm was Nuri. The storm formed in mid-August, and the team debated whether to fly it, Weissmann said. With a relatively calm storm season to that point, they finally decided, "there’s nothing better to do."
It was the right decision. Nuri hit the Philippines on Aug. 20, killing seven people, Agence France-Presse reported. Two days later, it swept into Hong Kong and prompted the island’s strongest storm warning in five years, the news agency reported.
The team ended up flying the storm four times, Harr said. By the end of the project, they flew a multitude of storms, including Sinlaku, which formed near the Philippines on Sept. 7. Two weeks later, the storm had traveled along that flicking jump rope — back to China, then eastward toward Japan and the northern Pacific. It was the storm the researchers had been waiting for.
"We did finish with a bang," Harr wrote in an e-mail last week.
Toward the end of the project, the teams flew the super typhoon Jangmi in late September. During that storm, they dropped a series of weather sensors — drifting buoys — in the path of the typhoon at about the time it reached maximum intensity, Harr wrote. That is another first in weather data collection, he noted.
Even when days were clear, the Air Force crews from Guam still flew during the project, according to Lt. Col. Roy Deatherage, a flight meteorologist and the 53rd’s mission commander for the deployment.
In addition to storm chasing, the U.S., German and Taiwanese planes took weather measurements throughout the region. In the Pacific, weather forecasters get their information from satellites. With so many weather assets around, the team wants to ensure the accuracy of those more automated tracking systems.
Additionally, the Germans are experimenting with a different type of weather sensor, one that replaces radars with lasers that use light to measure wind and water vapor concentration. Weissmann said they hope those laser systems will one day replace radio-wave radars.
Now that the flights have ended, another piece of the project will begin, according to Harr.
The scientists want to collect data from various storms’ lives to create computer simulations. With those models, they hope they can come closer to predicting the severity and life span of a storm, Harr said.
Stars and Stripes reporter Tim Wightman contributed to this story.
T-PARC, the THORPEX Pacific Asian Regional Campaign, is a $12 million, multinational project to study the formation and pathways of storms in the Pacific. The United States is a leading participant, with the National Science Foundation providing the majority of funding. The field portion of the project, Tropical Cyclone Structure-2008, is being paid for by the Office of Naval Research.
T-PARC is a project within THORPEX, a long-term research program organized under the World Meteorological Organization’s World Weather Research Program. The field portion of the project, TCS-08, is financially independent of T-PARC, though it works in tandem with the overall goal of studying the life cycle of tropical cyclones over the western and northern Pacific region.
Nine countries are participating in this season’s storm study, offering money, expertise and time to track storms. They are:
Canada
Providing money for the German aircraft.
China
Providing extra weather observations.
France
Providing the weather balloons, which record data as they fall.
Germany
The German Aerospace Center — known as the DLR — is flying its Falcon aircraft from Japan, tracking storms as they move northward. Also providing university scientists to do analysis and modeling of possible storms.
Japan
Providing coordination and research from the Japan Meteorological Agency.
South Korea
The Korea Meteorological Administration is providing money for the German aircraft and support with the storm modeling.
Taiwan
Using a DOTSTAR aircraft to follow storms, providing money to pay for weather monitors and extra observations.
UK
Working on data analysis to create storm models based on real data.
United States
The lead country in the project, providing headquarters at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.; two Air Force C-130s and members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron to track storms and monitor them from Guam; one Navy P-3 from Maryland to provide the same monitoring throughout the Pacific region; and forecasting at the 17th Operational Weather Squadron at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, to direct teams where to track the storms.
Ellie