[pulsing music plays]
Norcross: A hurricane is mother nature's grandest, but most ferocious weather machine.
Sullivan: A hurricane is two different things. If you're looking at it from above
from the satellite down, a hurricane is a beautiful thing.
It's a massive coil of clouds that is rotating, spinning like a top.
Sims: When I look at images of hurricanes, I go through
so many emotions. As a scientist, as a meteorologist,
I'm like, "Wow, this is fascinating.
You know, look at this beautiful storm.
[sound of waves and wind] But then the human side of me is saying,
"How can we make sure that people are evacuating, that people have somewhere to stay,
that they have the money to feed their families once they leave their homes?"
Sullivan: A hurricane on the ground
that's a completely different thing, because all of that rotation
you really feel as incredibly severe winds.
They can be up to 150 or more miles per hour.
You can have up to 40 inches of rain and the most deadly thing
is that the updraft from the hurricane is actually pulling ocean swell
up into it and so it creates a storm surge.
up to 40 feet high
DeMaria: And occasionally when the storms hit at a little higher latitude,
, they can also spawn tornadoes in their fringe.
So really the impacts are the wind, the storm surge, the heavy rainfall,
and then occasionally severe weather that forms when they move inland.
Sullivan: I feel like I got a deeper appreciation for hurricanes when I moved
to Galveston, Texas.That entire city,
it's almost like the ghosts of the 1900 hurricane … are still there
because you see evidence of that storm, that particular
famous storm that killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people.
And so that is a very present thing in the city
even to this day.
Kirschbaum: That was a category four storm that hit Galveston
on September 8th and there really was not a lot of information about
what was happening in the Caribbean before the storm made landfall.
Mandt: And the hurricane hit them totally unprepared
and thousands of people lost their lives.
Tremendous damage because it surprised everyone.
With the onsets of satellites, that will never happen.
Kim: The first leap forward would have been being able to see
the entire planet from space in the first place.
Prior to that, how would you know, for example, that a hurricane was coming?
It would have been very difficult to know where it was coming, where it was going,
how bad it was going to be.
Mandt: So, that's one of the dramatic impacts, is satellite data … sort of like,
your eyes in the sky to make sure that mother nature never can surprise you.
Sims: When I was a child, I loved playing with magnifying glasses
because you can zoom in and see so many fine details. And that's what we can do
with the satellites that we have now, particularly the GOES-R series.
We're getting 60 times more data now than what we were in the previous series.
Sullivan: You know, the first satellites I worked with, the GOES-I through M,
which were great satellites, but taking a picture of a globe every 25 minutes
you know the hurricanes would be here. And then they're here and then they're here.
And it's not like you're losing track of them. But the difference between that
and being able to see, oh, it's swerving. It's curling. Oh, it's dying.
We take a full disc picture of the entire hemisphere
in five minutes. But we can also look at smaller areas.
And you can scan that once every 30 seconds. You get to see
as the hurricane eye wall was forming, you can see that actually forming in real time.
The Earth looks alive … it looks like a living thing.
[shimmering music]
Mandt: So the polar orbiting satellites complement the geostationary,
, since a geostationary like 24,000 miles up.
While they get great pictures, it's really hard to measure
what is the state of the atmosphere from that distance.
So the polar orbiting are basically flying at little over 500 miles up.
And when you're at that altitude you can sense
what's in the atmosphere to a lot higher resolution.
The JPSS satellite, is really, primary purpose
is to take measurements of the temperature and moisture of the atmosphere
to drive the weather forecast models.
Kim: Two things that people always want to know about hurricanes
are how strong is it, and where is it going to hit?
And microwave sounders can certainly help with both of those.
The ability to see through clouds becomes really important.
If you've ever seen a picture of a hurricane from space,
mostly what you're seeing is clouds.
And you can get a better weather forecast, a better prediction of how strong the hurricane is
and where it's going to hit, which direction it's going to go, if you could see through those clouds
and see the structure of the atmosphere; maybe even the ocean conditions underneath that.
And so microwave sensors allow you to do that kind of thing.
Mandt: As you've seen, when they do the
there's usually a cone of uncertainty they put in the path.
We don't know exactly where it's going, but for the next three days
or five days or seven days, here's the cone that it could go in.
But you don't want to over-warn, right?
You don't want to have the whole East Coast run in inland a hundred miles
because of a hurricane, potential hurricane.
You'd like that as precise as you can, so that only the people who are really going to be affected have to do something.
The improved sensors that we've been flying
allow a better understanding of the core of that hurricane
and allow the forecasters to better predict precisely
where that hurricane is going to hit. And when they do that
then you can narrow and shrink that cone of uncertainty and give a better prediction.
DeMaria: We hope to continue to improve the ability to do track forecasting.
That's gotten so much better over the past couple of decades.
Our five-day forecast is about as accurate as our two-day forecast
was only about 20 years ago.
Porter: And increasingly, people are listening
to the forecast that they get from meteorologists. They have increased confidence,
, they see the improvement in forecasts as it relates to hurricanes over the last couple of decades.
And when a hurricane watch or hurricane warning goes into effect
people take notice and they take action. And that's really encouraging to see.
[music fades]