below I will copy a IMHO very interesting and Eyeopening Article from Dr Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground published on His Blogg this Noon, so I thought it is very well worth to share the Info.
-------------------------------------------
<table class="full" cellSpacing="0" cellPadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="full">Posted by:
JeffMasters, 1:38 PM ADT en Agosto 31, 2011</td><td id="pluscontain_1910" class="nobr">+19
</td><td>
</td><td>
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1910#http://twitter.com/share?url=http:/...+organizing;+threat+of+a+Gulf+of+Mexico+stormhttp://rss.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/rss.xml
<script type="text/javascript"> (function($){ $("div#socialWeather > a[id^='social']").each(function(index) { $(this).hover( function () { $(this).parent().css('background-position','0px -' +(26*(index+1))+ 'px'); }, function () { $(this).parent().css('background-position','0px 0px'); }); }); $("#socialTwitter").click(function() { locationurl="http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wunderground.com%2Fblog%2FJeffMasters%2Fcomment.html%3Fentrynum=1910"; var miniurl = $.ajax({ url: "/miniurl/api.php?url="+locationurl, async: false }).responseText; if(miniurl && miniurl.length>0) pageurl="http://twitter.com/share?url=" + encodeURIComponent(miniurl) + "&via=wunderground&related=wunderground&text=Grading+the+forecasts+for+Irene%3B+Katia+organizing%3B+threat+of+a+Gulf+of+Mexico+storm"; else pageurl="http://twitter.com/share?url=" + locationurl + "&via=wunderground&related=wunderground&text=Grading+the+forecasts+for+Irene%3B+Katia+organizing%3B+threat+of+a+Gulf+of+Mexico+storm"; window.open(pageurl,"twitterwindow","menubar=1,resizable=0,width=550,height=370"); return false; }); })(jQuery); </script></td></tr></tbody></table> Recovery from the destruction left behind by Hurricane Irene continues in the mid-Atlantic and New England states today. Irene's storm surge, winds, and record rains likely did $3 - $6 billion in insured damage to the U.S., according to
AIR-Worldwide. Since actual damages are typically double insured losses, Irene's total price tag will likely be $6 - $12 billion, making it one of the top 20
most expensive hurricanes to hit the U.S. Irene will be one of the most expensive Category 1 hurricanes ever; the record is held by 1972's
Hurricane Agnes, which did $11.8 billion in damage (2010 dollars.) As AIR Worldwide notes in their
press release, part of this damage is due to the costs of evacuation for the 2 million people that were evacuated. It costs approximately $1 million to evacuate each mile of U.S. coast warned
(Aberson et al., 2006). This number will be higher for more densely populated areas of the coast, such as Miami, and may be a factor of six lower for the North Carolina coast (Whitehead, 2003). So were we over-warned during Irene? Could the costs of the storm been lower due to better forecasts and fewer evacuations?
Figure 1. The National Hurricane Center forecast for Hurricane Irene issued five days before it hit Long Island, NY, compared with the actual track of Irene. The landfall locations along the coasts of North Carolina, New Jersey, and New York were pretty much spot-on, though the time of arrival was off by a few hours. The
NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory has a nice satellite animation of the storm's track superimposed on the NHC's cone of uncertainty forecast.
Well, the official NHC track forecast for Irene was remarkably good; the 5-day forecast was pretty much spot-on for landfall locations, though the timing of when the storm would arrive at the coast was off by a few hours (Figure 1.) This remarkably accurate forecast undoubtedly reduced the costs of unnecessary preparations, and probably saved many lives. NHC track forecasts have improved by over 50% since 1990. The average error in a 24-hour forecast was about 105 miles in 1990, and has averaged near 50 miles
the past few years. NHC director Bill Read stated in a interview this week that had Hurricane Irene come along before the recent improvements in track forecasting, hurricane warnings would have been issued for the entire Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina coasts. At an average cost of $1 million per mile of coast over-warned, this would have cost over $700 million. We can credit the investments made in hurricane research, improved satellites, and better computer models for the majority of this improvement. When we consider that
government funding for hurricane research has averaged $20 million per year during much of the past two decades, the roughly $200 million spent on hurricane research over the past 20 years
was paid back by over a factor of three during just one storm. According to a 2007
presentation at the 61st Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference, the improved hurricane forecasts between 2000 - 2006 resulted in savings of $3 billion compared to what the forecasts of the 1990s would have cost.
<b><big>What about intensity forecasting?</big></b><big></big>
Progress in making better intensity forecasts of hurricanes, though, has lagged. Over the past twenty years, there has been virtually no improvement in forecasting how strong or weak a hurricane will grow. NHC predicted Irene would hit North Carolina as a Category 3 storm, but it hit at Category 1 strength. Had the intensity forecast been better, many evacuations that were done for Irene could have been avoided. The failure of the intensity forecast led to many accusations that the storm was over-hyped, and an unnecessary amount of expensive preparations and evacuations were done. While I did see some over-hype by the media, I did not think it was more excessive than what has been the case for previous hurricanes.
Nate Silver of the New York Times makes some interesting comparisons of the media attention given to Irene versus previous storms, and finds that Irene had about the same amount of media attention as hurricanes Ike and Gustav of 2008. Given in inexperience of the mid-Atlantic and New England coasts with hurricanes, our lack of skill in making intensity forecasts, and the potential for high storm surge damage due to the size of Irene and its landfall during the highest tides of the month, I thought that the overly-cautious approach to evacuations along the coast was warranted.
<b><big>Better intensity forecasts threatened by budget cuts</big></b><big></big>
Better intensity forecasts of hurricane are possible, but it will take a large investment in hurricane research over an extended time to do that. Such an effort is underway; we are currently in year three of a ten-year program called the
Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP), funded at just over $1 million per year. The goals of the HFIP are to reduce the average errors of hurricane track and intensity forecasts by 20% within five years and 50% in ten years with a forecast period out to 7 days. In an interview I did last fall with the leader of the project, Dr. Frank Marks of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, he expressed to me optimism that the program could meet its objectives, provided it remains fully funded. Some of the experimental computer models developed by HFIP have done very well so far during the 2011 hurricane season, so I see reason for optimism, too. However, this project is in serious danger of failure, due to the current budget-cutting emphasis in Washington D.C. A key tool we need to make better intensity forecasts is to have detailed measurements inside the core of the hurricane from instrumented aircraft. Without detailed observations, there is no hope of making a good intensity forecast, no matter how good your model is. During Hurricane Irene, the two P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft and G-IV jet operated by NOAA's
Aircraft Operations Center flew continuously into the storm, taking detailed measurements via dropsonde and Doppler radar that were fed in real time to the experimental HFIP computer models. In theory, these measurements by the Hurricane Hunters should be able to significantly improve our intensity forecasts over the coming years. However, the current proposed budget from the House of Representatives mandates a $400 million cut for NOAA, and the NOAA Hurricane Hunters are slated to have their budget cut by 40%, from $29 million to $17 million per year. If these cuts materialize, the ability of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters to continue to aid improvements in hurricane forecasting will be seriously impacted. Many of the critical technologies used operationally now by the Air Force Hurricane Hunters and NOAA jet to improve hurricane forecasts--dropsondes, real-time high-density observations, and the SFMR surface wind measuring instrument--were developed on the NOAA P-3s as research projects, then were migrated to operational use once they proved their worth. The cost of hurricane damages in the U.S. has been
doubling every ten years since the 1960s, and is
expected to continue to double every ten years, even without the likely coming increase in storm surge damages due to accelerating sea level rise. A Category 1 hurricane doing $10 billion in damage should be a wake-up call that we need to continue our investments in hurricane research to reduce the costs of the inevitable coming storms.
Slashing funding by 40% for a research group that was instrumental in saving $700 million in costs from just one storm makes no sense, and I hope Congress will reconsider the proposed cuts for NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center.
References
Whitehead, J.C., 2003:
"One million dollars per mile? The opportunity costs of Hurricane evacuation",
Ocean and Coastal Management 46, 1069.
----------------------------------------
Mike
