As the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season unfolds, millions of people along the Eastern seaboard of the USA are keeping a careful watch on the weather forecast. What are researchers doing to improve the prediction of hurricane intensity – and ultimately help save lives?

While experts are able to predict the track a hurricane will take with increasing accuracy, predicting their intensity is much more of a challenge. “We saw several times in this last hurricane season where storms just intensified really rapidly, and that process is not well forecast right now,” says the University of Miami’s Professor of Ocean Sciences, Brian Haus.

Haus is director of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science’s Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. Surge Structure Atmosphere Interaction Laboratory – otherwise known as SUSTAIN. Here, he and a team of researchers are trying to improve forecasts of hurricane intensity and associated storm surges. Their efforts are supported by advanced scientific tools from Nortek, a Norwegian acoustic instrumentation developer. “The ultimate goal of our research here is to save lives by improving hurricane forecasts,” Haus explains. “We want to be able to plan evacuations more smartly, to evacuate only the people that need to be evacuated…”

Read the full story over at Marine Technology News.

Image: Four Tropical Cyclones Across the Entire Pacific Ocean. Credit NASA/NOAA GOES Project/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)