Dear Panelists,
If you are not yet aware, I did my Senior Directed Study on hurricanes – specifically, on hurricane intensity and hurricane intensity forecasting. I’ve always had an interest in weather, which drew me to the subject of meteorology in the first place. I specifically chose hurricane forecasting because it is one of the most difficult parts of weather forecasting, especially with regards to hurricane intensity forecasting.
In the first semester, I concerned myself mainly with hurricane intensity forecasting, especially with regards to rapid intensification within hurricanes. Hurricane intensity is difficult due to the large number of factors that control intensity, such as hurricane track, oceanic heat, atmospheric thermodynamics, and inner-core (of the hurricane) dynamics. It is incredibly difficult to forecast if and when rapid intensification will occur (rapid intensification in hurricanes is when a hurricane strengthens by a large amount (30kts or more) in a short period of time (24 hours), and is relatively rare). As well, rapid intensification can cause a great deal of damage upon unsuspecting locations – Hurricane Charley (2004) intensified from a Category 2 storm to a Category 4 storm in the 12 hours prior to landfall, causing much greater damage than was expected.
I wanted to research whether there was a characteristic of hurricanes or their environments that indicated whether storms were more likely to rapidly intensify. What I found through my research – through talking with people, reading papers and journals – was that there was a correlation between storm size and potential for rapid intensification. That is, the smaller and more compact a hurricane was, the more likely it was for that storm to rapidly intensify.
Taking the concept of storm size, I applied this finding to my field work for the second semester. There are a few indexes used to track certain levels of hurricane intensity – Saffir-Simpson Scale is one of the best known (it’s the scale that gives us Category 1, 2, 3, etc.), but there is another scale titled Accumulated Cyclone Energy, or ACE. ACE is calculated using the maximum wind speed of a hurricane, calculated at six hour intervals over the lifetime of a hurricane. I wanted to revise this scale, as I believed it to be too simplistic for determining the energy of a cyclone – there is simply much more to the energy of a cyclone than its maximum winds. When I e-mailed nearly twenty professors and meteorologists, asking them about Saffir-Simpson and ACE, I received replies from nearly half of them. Their responses were both overwhelming positive, supportive, and gave me a direction for which I could take my field work. I got some great insights that lead to the development of a new, revised version of ACE. I hope to share my findings with you during my presentation in a few weeks, and look forward to your feedback. Thank you again for agreeing to participate.
Now, I invite you to explore this blog on your own, but here are a few highlights I would suggest first.
From first semester
- Guiding Questions
- Abstract
- Research Paper
From second semester
- Field Work Guiding Questions and Description
- Mentor, Professionals, Documentation
- Bibliography
- Selected Journal Entries - first, second, third, fourth, fifth
- Culminating Theory
