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The current nine-year “drought” is the longest period of time that has passed without a major hurricane making landfall in the U.S. since reliable records began in 1850, said Timothy Hall, a research scientist who studies hurricanes at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York.
The National Hurricane Center calls any Category 3 or more intense hurricane a “major” storm. Hall and colleague Kelly Hereid, who works for ACE Tempest Re, a reinsurance firm based in Connecticut, ran a statistical hurricane model based on a record of Atlantic tropical cyclones from 1950 to 2012 and sea surface temperature data.
The researchers ran 1,000 computer simulations of the period from 1950-2012 – in effect simulating 63,000 separate Atlantic hurricane seasons. They found that a nine-year period without a major landfall is likely to occur once every 177 years on average.
While the study did not delve into the meteorological causes behind this lack of major hurricane landfalls, Hall said it appears it is a result of luck.
Research: The frequency and duration of U.S. hurricane droughts.
Journal: Geophysical Research Letters, May 5, 2015.
Link to paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL063652/full.
Here is the YouTube video.
Used in 2014 Calendar.
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The GPM core satellite carries two instruments that show the location and intensity of rain and snow, which defines a crucial part of the storm structure – and how it will behave. The GPM Microwave Imager sees through the tops of clouds to observe how much and where precipitation occurs, and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar observes precise details of precipitation in 3-dimensions.
For more information about the science behind Hurricane Matthew visit: http://www.nasa.gov/matthew
For the latest storm warnings and safety information please consult your local news channels and the National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng
Music credit: Diamond Skies by Andrew Skeet [PRS], Anthony Phillips [PRS] from the KillerTracks catalog
These visualizations were created to support presenstations at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) 2011.
When hurricanes intensify a large amount in a short period, scientists call this process rapid intensification. This is the hardest aspect of a storm to forecast and it can be most critical to people’s lives.
While any hurricane can threaten lives and cause damage with storm surges, floods, and extreme winds, a rapidly intensifying hurricane can greatly increase these risks while giving populations limited time to prepare and evacuate.
The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission is a joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission that measures all forms of precipitation around the globe. GPM's Microwave Imager, or GMI, has proven useful in seeing beneath the swirling clouds and into the structure of tropical cyclones. The information gathered by GPM and other missions will be used to improve forecast models.
While each partner satellite has its own mission objective, they all carry a type of instrument called a radiometer that measures radiated energy from rainfall and snowfall. The GPM Core satellite carries two instruments: a state-of-the-art radiometer called the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) and the first space-borne Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR), which sees the 3D structure of falling rain and snow. The DPR and GMI work in concert to provide a unique database that will be used to improve the accuracy and consistency of measurements from all partner satellites, which will then be combined into the uniform global precipitation dataset.
In this animation the orbit paths of the partner satellites of the GPM constellation fill in blue as the instruments pass over Earth. Rainfall appears light blue for light rain, yellow for moderate, and red for heavy rain. Partner satellites are traced in green and purple, and the GPM Core is traced in red.
The GPM Core observatory is currently being built and tested at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It is scheduled to launch from Tanegashima space center in Japan in early 2014.
For more information and resources please visit the Precipitation Measurement Missions web site.
Water consumed the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, submerging chunks of Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
NASA’s satellites watched the devastation from overhead, sending down a deluge of data that scientists would study for years to come.
For more information about Hurricane Katrina:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2005/h2005_katrina.html