URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

Isaac Ginis Professor Oceanography

“It’s a few thousand dollars for each deployment of the instruments, which are lost after they are used,” explains Ginis. He wants to optimize where the instruments are deployed during the hurricane to allow the NHC to make most use of the data. Ginis says he hopes that his work to make forecasts more accurate will allow homeowners and businesses to take necessary precautions before a storm: “Every time a big storm makes landfall, we are often surprised by the amount of impact. Especially in Rhode Island, I believe that we really need to improve the modeling capabilities here to better understand the risk we face.”

Ginis’s current work focuses on how to improve the accuracy of predicting hurricane intensity. “Existing weather forecast models do a pretty good job of forecasting the track of a storm,” he says. “Predicting how strong a hurricane is going to be is what requires the higher resolution. We need to better understand the air-sea interaction phenomena.” A hurricane is driven by evaporation, or heat coming from the ocean. But friction between the hurricane and the ocean water causes the storm to lose its energy. To predict the storm’s strength, researchers need to calculate how much energy the hurricane gains from and dissipates to the ocean. The key parameters of this research are the temperatures of the ocean water, on and below the surface, which control the hurricane’s intensity. Ginis has already worked with satellite engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to improve the detection of ocean surface temperature. Now he is interested in improving the data from instruments that are dropped from storm-chasing aircraft into hurricanes. The instruments send real-time temperature measurements to the operational hurricane model as they sink beneath the waves.

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Spring | 2015 Page 7