38th Conference on Broadcast Meteorology

[JonathanBelles]

Hello Weather Lovers and Weather Workers alike!!!

Right now I am sitting in Tampa International Airport waiting for my flight to Miami for the 38th conference on Broadcast Meteorology. It is my first meteorology trip that I have ever been on, and its the first trip where I know absolutely nobody. Last night while making my final changes to my pathable (AMS social networking site), the only spot I had open was for "Organization representing". Most people chose the news station, government agency, or the school they go to. I decided to choose Storm2k.org for many reasons over my school (Florida State University). I asked David (Vbhoutex) last night if I could do this, and he seemed to support me (after he asked me why I didn't choose FSU).

And to answer this question, I really had no choice but to choose Storm2k.org for my organization. I have gotten 90% of my meteorological knowledge from this community, and I never would have begun forecasting without it.

I will begin blogging tomorrow afternoon in this thread with my newest knowledge and pictures from the NHC and the conference. If any of you have questions, I will take a swing at them, and then try to get them answered by conference attendees. Like I said I do not know anyone at this conference, so I'm not sure how much I will be able to get answered.

As far as the conference itself, it is set up with many workshops including topics on oceanography, space weather, career development, broadcasting techniques, disaster mitigation, tropical and severe weather, and climate change. Bill Read and most of other NHC familiar names, Craig Fugate (FEMA), and numerous other well known names in meteorology will be talking and presenting. Tomorrow there is a short course on the tropics taught by the NHC, Hurricane Hunters, and the AMS that I am VERY excited about. On Saturday I will be going to the NHC and AOML, another part of the trip that I am very excited about.

I will try my best to do a few forecasts from the conference on 93L and whatever else pops up in the meantime, but please do not count on it. If anyone is in the Miami area, I would LOVE to see you all. I will be staying at the Deauville Beach resort, and most my days end at 3-5pm, so almost all of my nights are free. I would love to have dinner or go to the beach with anyone who is in the area! I will not have a car while I am there, so please keep this in mind.

If any of you have any questions, please ask them as soon as possible so that I can get to them.

See you soon!!!

Jonathan-Fact789

[Tireman4]

Woo Hoo Go Fact Go!!! Make us proud!!!

[somethingfunny]

Oh man....awesome!!!!!!!


I'm officially jealous of you. Make sure you enjoy your trip!!!!!!!

[JonathanBelles]

I woke up this morning to a light drizzle and a bright rainbow right over downtown Miami. Very breezy here at the hotel, and still a little rain. I have registered with the AMS for both the conference and the short course on the tropics. The activities are about to begin and people are beginning to roll in.

[JonathanBelles]

Good Morning everyone!!

Yesterday was the short course specifically designed to dive deep into the tropics. Most of the NHC forecasters spoke at one time or another, and all talks except one were given by the NHC. Here are a couple of the speakers from yesterday. I havent had the time to type all of it out yet, and more will be coming. I may revise these later on as I go back through my notes. What I have typed below is what immediately caught me by surprise, or something that I either did not know or something that was very interesting to me. A lot of the speakers overlapped in their talks, so if you don't see something here, just wait. For instance with the HLT and its response to the Deepwater Disaster, it was brought up numerous other times later in the day.

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Short Course on Tropical Meteorology

--Bill Read (NHC) – The Road Ahead
   *The Hurricane Liason Team (HLT) – a team that has been around for about 10 years
Its mission is to relay information to the local NWSFO's, FEMA, and local/state EOC's.
It mainly acts as decision support, and is currently working with the Deepwater Disaster and Haiti
Bill's main concern with this Hurricane Season is Haiti because people are moving into the valleys to get away from the the landslides.  If a hurricane comes along flash floods are a huge threat to the 1-1.5 million homeless in Haiti.
   *NOAA Hurricane Forecast System Improvement Plan – 10 year plan to improve all aspects of hurricane forecasting; now in its 2nd year.
-Goals of this initiative is to:
o get reliable hurricane forecasts out to 7 days
o improve track AND intensity forecasts by 50% in 10 years
-Hurricane forecasting is as good at 48 hours now as it was at 24 hours in 1999!
*Intensity forecasts for rapidly intensifying storms are “ugly” (Bill Read)
*Surge forecasts are a long way out due to the non-meterological aspects of meteorology such as the geography of a coastline, old technology, and the new developments within oceanography

   

–Jack Beven (NHC) – Strengths and Limitations of TC Obs
   *NHC has a somewhat different Dvorak technique for subtropical systems due to their different shapes and cloud patterns
   *Hurricane Hunters will all soon be equip with wider swath radars underneath them to obtain better wind estimates
   *SFMR is not as accurate as the NHC would like due to small (and large) changes in the atmosphere, and is not very trustworthy
   *Local ground radars – if maximum winds are not perfectly aligned away or towards the radar, the highest winds will not be measured
   *Beven wishes that all of the local obs (from schools, homes, ect.) would be relayed to the NWS/NOAA so that observations would be more expansive.

--Barry Choy (Hurricane Hunters MacDill) – Hurricane Hunters
   *Aircraft have nearly been lost due to salt[water] accumulation during some hurricane flights
   *Five or more emergency lights may come on during a flight through one side of an eyewall, all of which are ignored until the plane is entirely in the eye
   *In a flight through Category 5 Katrina, the hurricane hunters hit a seagull that was flying around in the eye
   *The future of the Hurricane Hunters:
      -–Global Hawk
         o Very high altitude plane (65,000 feet)
         o 30 Hour flight time
         o 11, 000 mile maximum flight distance
         o Will be used for Upper Air/Atmospheric sampling

      --Coyote
         o Non-human flight
         o Foldable plane that can be stored in a manned jet
         o Hurricane Hunters will begin using it in the eyes of hurricanes this summer
         o Maximum flight time is 1 hour
   * To a flight meteorologist, lightning is one of the most significant signs of a changing storm and a bumpy flight

[wx247]

Very interesting read Fact!!! Sounds like you are learning a lot. I think my face would look like this if five emergency lights came on in any vehicle or aircraft I was in... hurricane or not!

Keep us posted. This thread is great!!!

[KWT]

I think that confirms what we all thought about SFMR, that it isn't nearly as accurate as some would like us to believe.

[dizzyfish]

Ah, leave it up to the young folks to have all the fun!

You make us very proud Jonathan.

Have fun, learn a lot and thank you for sharing!

[JonathanBelles]

Hey everyone. I do not have an update tonight other than to say its gonna be at least Friday before the next update most likely. In the last two weeks I've been literally from the west coast to the east coast of the US. I also just started my Phi Theta Kappa Leadership Certification class on facebook this week. I am also doing a rather large Hurricane Seminar for my school on Thursday.

I will wet your appetite by saying I did visit the AOML and the NHC while I was in Miami, and I have a LOT of pictures. I got to meet most of the NHC forecasters. Also, there will be an explosion of satellite data by the middle to end of the decade that I am very excited about. I participated in probably 20-30 presentations, and have about 10-15 pages of notes on everything. This not only encludes tropical meteorology, but antarctic research, severe weather, and broadcast economics (and A LOT more).

I will try to get more of my notes out as soon as I can.

[JonathanBelles]

For those that are on facebook, all 200 pictures from the NHC, the AOML, the Everglades, and my flights are now up.

[JonathanBelles]

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--Richard Pasch (NHC) – Strengths and Limitations of TC Models
   *CLPR – Not only a climatological model, but a persistence model as well. It is also the baseline for track forecast skill.
   *(stressed by NHC) – HWRF is still a work in progress, and may take a few years in order to get a working format
   *(stressed by the NHC) – Do NOT use the HWRF or the GFDL for eyewall intensity due to the lack of computing resolution
   *In late July, the GFS will be updated again to a 25km Resolution
   *Almost all models have been updated since the peak of last hurricane season
   *NHC is moving away from using many of the ensemble forecasts except for the GFS and ECMWF ensembles.
   *18z models are put into the 0z forecasts in some models, and those that are done this way are intropolated trackwise.
   *Single Track Models:
      o GFS has more of a west/left bias in the GOM, and in this case the GFS ensembles are better
      o The #1 performance model changes each year, but the Euro and GFS are usually very close
      o GFDL is currently #1 for Days 1-3
      o ECMWF is currently #1 for Days 4-5, which is getting better at all time frames
   *Single Intensity Models:
      o best intensity models are the LGEM and the NHC forecast.
      o GFDL/HWRF predict Rapid Intensification (RI) less than 50% of the time
      o RII (Rapid Intensification Index) is being updated to improve intensity forecasts
      o GFS is good at forecasting cyclogenesis over the EPAC and the E. ATL, and the UKMET is getting better over time
      o The hurricane models currently are very poor at initializing realistic inner core physics
      o Cyclogenesis forecasting is very poor over the Gulf of Mexico [ due to the proximity of land ]
   
--Lixion Avila (NHC) – Forecast Processes: Using Track and Intensity Guidance
   *Small spread/high confidence? Not always
      Two cases:
         -Ernesto – Track was way off of what was forecasted
- Wilma – The timing with Wilma's Florida landfall way horribly off due to the rapid change in forward speed
   [Avila is an arachnophobe aka he does not like spider-like model plots – just thought this was comical]
   *NHC always emphasizes model consistency rather model flip-flops; flip-flops are only taken into account after the second model run showing the flop
   *Advisory #1 for any storm is by far the hardest because the NHC does not have many of its models already running, and it does not have a track record for the storm as it does for later advisories
   *Tropical Depressions are harder to forecast for than hurricanes are
   * Intensity forecasts cannot be made from a consensus of the models because (i.e.) the models may make a consensus around the low end of a probability, when the correct outlier may be much stronger, or it may be the other way around.
   *[Quick note] – Avila almost removed Humberto from the TWD/TWO just 18 hours before it became a hurricane!
   
   *Persistance in any set of model runs is key
   *The NHC leans towards conservatism for intensity forecasts.  There is about a 12 hour (2-advisory) lag time for large changes in intensity.
   *A Question was posed to Avila about short lead time intensity changes, and the questioner mentioned storms like Humberto and Claudette in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically wondered about large intensity markups with only < 36 hours before landfall.  This question was averted by Avila.  :|
   *This year the NHC will be putting more emphasis on the hurricane warning area as opposed to the forecast track line and cone

I also wanted to mention that with Pasch's talk, he included a lot more data in his powerpoint on each individual model that I did not take not of, but I do have the data. If anyone wants what he said on an individual model, feel free to ask. As far as Avila's talk, he included a lot on how intensity forecasts are done and everything that goes into them, and I can include that as well if anyone wants a more in depth analysis.

[JonathanBelles]

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--Mike Brennan (NHC) – Forecast Uncertainty
   o Two Definitions for track errors:
      +Along-Track Error : Timing errors – faster or slower than the official product
      +Cross-Track Error : Location errors – to the left or right of the official product
   
   *The NHC is required to verify all forecasts made officially, but does not verify intermediate or special advisories
   *Forecast track error is the distance between the official product and forecast product; measured in n mi.
   *Forecast intensity error is the difference between the real intensity and the forecast intensity; measured in knots
   *All forecasts are compared to the CLIPER

   *2009 was the best year ever for track forecasts
   *4- and 5-day track error was almost all along-track (slow) errors
   *Track errors currently increase 50-55 n mi per day
   * 48hr mean track error was below 100 n mi for the 2nd year in a row
   * Track error has been cut in half in the last 15 years
   *Track was better in 2009 than the 5-year average even though 2009 had 'harder' storms to forecast
   
   *NHC would prefer forecast intensity ranges beyond 3 days out to 7 days.
   * Intensity errors level off after 72 hours  because “you can only be so wrong”
   *No progress has been made in the last 15-20 years in terms of intensity
   *The NHC says it is more likely to make large underestimates than small over estimates (the two largest intensity errors)
   
   *The EPAC track errors have decreased by 30-50% since 1990, and intensity errors have not changed.