Storm prognosticator: Knowledge is power

National Hurricane Center czar lists goals at Rice conference

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Accurate forecasts may be key to keeping people safe from a storm, said Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), but he’d willingly give up a bit to save lives.

”I’d sacrifice some accuracy in a really severe storm to get that word out earlier … and get people paying attention to it,” he told an audience at Rice University Wednesday for the opening of the Severe Storm Prediction and Global Climate Impact in the Gulf Coast Conference.

	BILL READ

Those are reasonable words in the wake of Hurricane Ike, when some coastal Texas residents were warned to evacuate with the threat of ”certain death.” Still, good information delivered quickly is the NHC’s stock-in-trade, and Read detailed the agency’s ambitious goals to fine-tune its predictions over the next decade.

The three-day event sponsored by the Rice-based SSPEED Center brought experts in many aspects of storm prediction and recovery to the campus, with sessions scheduled on flooding, evacuations, climate change and the fallout from hurricanes Katrina and Ike.

Read had planned to discuss the ”people problems” with hurricanes, but Ike’s recent visit shifted his focus to the science of hurricane prediction and his agency’s efforts to advance it. He said the accuracy of calling hurricanes has come a long way over the past 40 years, and he detailed the NHC’s ambitious goals for the next decade, among them refining the ability to predict the rapid intensification of Gulf storms and pushing the accurate prediction of a hurricane’s path to seven days from the current five.

”Decision timelines expand to meet the length of our forecast,” he said, noting that state and local officials need good information as far in advance as possible to move emergency supplies in and, when necessary, people out.

”While the human-nature aspects may be the same, how each community deals with a hurricane may be entirely different,” he said. ”That’s why it’s so imperative we focus on the science and the large-scale picture and let local officers help the decision-makers.

”There’s no way I and my officers can know what roughly 1,000 counties are doing.”

This year, he said, NHC statistics showed the agency’s 48-hour forecasts predicted the paths of hurricanes to an accuracy of about 80 miles; for the 24-hour forecast, it was a little less than 50 miles. ”We’re making considerable gains on our track forecast,” said Read. ”That’s been our No. 1 accomplishment over the years.”

His goal is to reduce the amount of error in tracking storms by 50 percent over the next 10 years and to improve modeling to reduce uncertainty in the 72-to-120-hour forecast by the same amount.

Read displayed a summer day’s map that showed the status of several hurricanes, including Ike, as well as a number of tropical depressions. ”This is the chart that’s on the president’s desk every morning,” he said, adding that another long-term goal is to predict the formation of tropical depressions 24 hours in advance.

With an array of equipment, including hurricane hunter aircraft, satellites and NEXRAD radars, already in play and more in the works, he said the real advances in tracking hurricanes will come in computer modeling. “We’re trying to get the experts in modeling at various universities to push the envelope. The gains you see in forecasting are primarily going to be the result of gains in modeling.”

Read, who was meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service Houston/Galveston Forecast Office from 1992 until last August, said the Gulf Coast homes of several friends were destroyed in Ike.

He recalled watching TV reports on Ike at the NHC’s Florida headquarters and thinking about the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston, costing 8,000 lives. “I remember saying, ‘Other than the seawall and the Hummers, it’s the same thing as 1900’” — the difference being the lives saved this time.

A simple rule of thumb to being on a barrier island is, if you’ve got a hurricane approaching and you’re anywhere in the risk zone, evacuate,” said Read. “It’s OK to live out there, but let’s use some common sense and get out of there. You put our rescue people in harm’s way.”