Hurricane Season 2019: Can multi-billion dollar satellites help forecasters?
The dawn of Oct. 10 revealed the true monster Michael had become.
Mesovortices — ferocious pinwheels of air spinning like ball bearings inside the hurricane’s eye — caught the sun’s early rays in a chilling clarity not seen before in a Category 5 land-falling cyclone.
Beamed down from the nascent GOES East satellite 22,300 miles above the Earth, the icy swirls are typically stronger than a storm itself, and an indication that Michael had gained dangerous power under the cover of darkness. GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite.
Launched in 2016, the GOES East became operational last year following a test period in 2017.
It carries the Advanced Baseline Imager — a 16-channel camera built by the Melbourne-based Harris Corp. Its predecessor had just five channels.
Also, images that used to click and send every 15 to 30 minutes can now relay to forecasters in consistent rapid fire 5-minute intervals and even every 30 seconds in cases of severe weather.
“Just about every day we look at images and say we are seeing stuff we’ve never seen before,” said Derrick Herndon, associate researcher and hurricane satellite specialist at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. “I would say it is a big improvement.”
Beyond the meteorological eye candy, storm experts said the satellite is a boon to forecasters trying to predict weather systems as bold as hurricanes, as acute as single-cell thunderstorms, and as ethereal as morning fog.
“We have 60 times as much data as before,” said Jim Yoe, chief administrative officer for NOAA’s Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation. “It’s a challenge to use it all, but we are excited about the opportunity.”
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GOES East and its sibling GOES West are the latest in a series of GOES satellites that were first launched in 1975. GOES West was launched in 2018. Geostationary means they orbit Earth, keeping pace with the planet's spin.
This series of satellites, which includes two more that will launch before 2036, cost $10.8 billion. The hefty price tag covers development, launch, operation and decommissioning.
While officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the two satellites haven’t been in operation long enough to make detailed assessments of their performance in weather forecasting, anecdotal accounts and a handful of independent research papers have touted improvements, or potential improvements the new instruments could have.
Dan Brown, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, said he relies heavily on cameras that capture visible images and an infrared channel — there are six — that is less sensitive to moisture in the air.
But one of the biggest advances is having three water vapor bands where the old satellite only had one.
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“Now we have upper, middle and lower water vapor that provides moisture content in the different levels of the atmosphere,” Brown said. “During storm strengthening, you definitely need low to mid-level moisture in the atmosphere.”
In forecasting Tropical Storm Gordon, which developed overnight near the Florida Keys on Sept. 3, it was the early morning visible images that helped pinpoint the storm’s circulation.
At night, forecasters are limited to infrared images measuring the temperature of cloud tops, but making it difficult to see the motion closer to the surface that would show a closed low.
Also, one way of forecasting hurricanes is by watching cloud and water vapor movements. With images available as quickly as every 30 seconds, track and intensity forecasts could improve. There were 18 cases of rapid intensification during the 2018 season, which is defined as a storm gaining 34 mph or more in 24 hours. Three were correctly forecast.
One paper published in 2017 with using model data similar to what GOES East produces showed a reduction in intensity forecast errors by 10 percent when looking at the cases of three previous hurricanes, Herndon said.
“We’ve had benefits with previous satellites, but it’s the clarity, the high resolution, the unprecedented detail that GOES gives us,” said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations with the Storm Prediction Center.
As of Thursday, the Storm Prediction Center was going on 15 straight days of forecasting severe weather, including multiple tornadoes, in the Midwest and Great Plains. Predicting where thunderstorms will develop is one of the biggest challenges in severe weather forecasting, Bunting said.
GOES East helps by providing details of where cumulous clouds are blooming, pinpointing the convergence of moist air that can become treacherous supercell thunderstorms.
“People can see storm evolution in real time,” Poe said. “We can confidently send out a warning, or not send out a false warming, because of the fine granularity, sharpness and timeliness of the images.”
Kmiller@pbpost.com
@KmillerWeather
