NASA project weighs nitty-gritty details of hurricane formationby John Nelander
What are the ingredients that go into the making of a major, catastrophic hurricane?
That’s what NASA is preparing to find out when it launches its detailed hurricane study on Aug. 15. In coordination with two other government weather agencies, as many as six aircraft will be used to investigate a single storm.
They’ll pull together data on temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. But researchers will also break the system down to its nitty-gritty elements: The composition of ice particles within the clouds, even checking to see if their nuclei contain African dust.
One major ingredient is sea surface temperature (SST), and NASA released the above (top) image to show what hot ocean water can do to a tropical system. In this case it’s the 2005 menace, Hurricane Katrina, which was born as a tropical storm just east of South Florida and then tore through Broward and Miami-Dade counties, emerging in the Gulf of Mexico as a powerhouse.
Check out the water temperatures in the composite photograph, a 3-day average of temps in the Caribbean and Atlantic, from August 25-27, of that year. Thirty degree Celsius water is 86 degrees Fahrenheit, so you can see how warm the Gulf was at that point.
I found SST for July 23-26 and posted the results beneath the Katrina image for comparison purposes. You can see that despite the cold winter that drove water temperatures down in the Gulf, they’ve rebounded quickly and are now, in some spots, above normal.
Water temperature isn’t the only factor in hurricane development. Wind shear and Saharan dust play a huge role. It will be interesting to see what other ingredients the NASA mission comes up with, and how they interact to create a monster like Katrina or Hurricane Wilma.
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The National Hurricane Center is watching two areas of disturbed weather as we near the end of the month. One is in the eastern Caribbean. The other is in the Central Atlantic and has been designated Invest 90L. The latter has a better shot at developing into a tropical depression, or Tropical Storm Colin, as it churns toward the west at about 10 mph.
It was plotted at 8.2N 31.3W, a mere 3,400 miles east-southeast of Palm Beach.
Most of the computer models steer the system north of the Antilles, after which it may spin out to sea. But it’s too far out to make any real predictions, and it will have to be watched closely.