TRACKING HURRICANES

October 2003
		In recent years, scientists have made leaps and bounds in improving our ability to predict and track hurricanes, mitigating their destructive power. Two scientists, Dr. Naomi Surgi of the National Hurricane Center and Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University's Tropical Meteorology Project, answer your questions about the latest developments in predicting and tracking the devastating storms.

Online NewsHour Special Report: Tracking Hurricanes Forum Introduction How does your field approach view the work being done in chaos theory? Is lack of temperature soundings in the sea the main problem in track prediction? What are the flights through the hurricane like for the observers on board? Are you concerned that such warming might cause not continued warming but a total irreversible change in realities? I was wondering what role Linux and computer clustering have in NOAA's hurricane modeling efforts? Are there any hurricane models that treat a storm as an electrical model where temperature is represented as resistance?	Steve McWilliams of Albuquerque, N.M., asks: On the October 1 NewsHour one of the last scientists mentioned that there was uncertainty about how a one-degree change can cause doubling of the storms. I would suggest that nature is not linear but fractal and with the increase in global temperatures and the heating of the oceans to depths of more than a mile such responses would seem reasonable. Are you concerned that such warming might cause not continued warming but a total irreversible change in realities? Dr. Naomi Surgi responds: Hurricanes require much more than simply warm ocean waters, and it is very premature to claim that a warming of the ocean temperatures alone will cause more hurricanes. Hurricanes develop only when a very specific set of atmospheric conditions are in place. We see this in the tropical Atlantic, where one can get either a very active season or extremely inactive season for essentially the same ocean temperatures. The difference between these seasons depends on the atmospheric conditions above, which on seasonal time scales tend to be controlled by global climate phenomena occurring on yearly and decadal time scales. The jury is still out on how other aspects of climate variability or climate change may affect hurricane activity. Dr. William Gray responds: No, the global warming threat has been grossly exaggerated. The temperature changes are mostly natural changes that would have occurred whether humans had put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or not. Ocean temperature is important but it is not only physical processes causing hurricane intensity change.