About a month before Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas with an amount of rain so immense forecasters said it could not happen more than once in a thousand years, a University of Miami scientist developing a new weather tool knew what might be in store for the Gulf coast.
“I can’t claim ‘problem solved’ or anything like that,” said Ben Kirtman, an atmospheric scientist at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. But his experimental model could “preemptively improve your chances of not having a catastrophe.”
The 2017 Atlantic season will be remembered among the 10 worst on record, blamed for killing hundreds, costing billions and producing hurricanes with unprecedented fury. Harvey, the first major hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in a dozen years, set a new U.S. record for rainfall. Irma followed, hammering Florida and Puerto Rico with fierce winds that made it the strongest hurricane ever recorded outside the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico. Then Maria pounded Puerto Rico, further crippling it.
But for hurricane researchers, the season that ends Nov. 30 will also be remembered as a grueling run for prediction models and emerging forecast tools like Kirtman’s that up to now had not seen such monster storms.
So how did they perform? The good news is the chief model produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and used by the National Hurricane Center helped produce the best track forecasts since the center began issuing tracks. Earlier warnings came for storms nearing land, and new maps provided the arrival times for damaging winds.
Read more at our news partner, the Miami Herald.
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