Hurricane Matthew Blog - Part 5, Post-Florida Observations

The hurricane has gone from Florida.  But it might not be the last of Hurricane Matthew in the Bahamas, Cuba, and Florida.

Granted, many things can happen in just five days, as evinced by the entire track history of just about every hurricane.  Should it live so long, it might actually make a loop-d-loop.  Many storms have done this, but fortunately Matthew won't be able to strengthen much as it will be re-entering waters that are chilled from the passage of Matthew.  It isn't, however, the only storm to drive up the coast like that.  The other two named hurricanes that did, 1979 David and 1964 Cleo, are both retired; the third was unnamed in 1926.

Notice that all 3 of these storms were (a) a major hurricane at one point, (b) were Category 2 or weaker when they impacted the coast, and (c) made landfall.  Clearly, even Brevard County has the potential for impacts from major hurricanes even if the circumstances favorable for such an event aren't likely to come together that often.

There are several factors that help determine the effects of a storm, but here's just some of the possibilities: the lunar cycle, the tides, wind speed, distance from the eye, the velocity, and the size of the wind field.

The wobbles created by the eyewall replacement cycle spared the east coast of Florida from what would have been the largest natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina, likely surpassing it.  The east coast is highly populated, and Category 3-4 winds would have been wreaking havoc from Grant-Valkaria up to Jacksonville, with Category 1 winds or so in the adjacent inland counties, such as Orange and Seminole Counties.

Check out the storm track history here: Matthew track

At one point, the forecast was for the eye of the storm to rip right up Brevard County at 145 mph winds.  This was why people were encouraged to leave, especially on the beach.  At that point, the coast was looking at storm surge of around 11-15 feet, with many beaches being under this at their peak altitude, meaning the barrier island as a whole would have been swamped.  Even Jim Cantore said that he thought the county as a whole was unsafe and went all the way down to Fort Pierce.

Still a monster, but a more distant one

The eyewall replacement was a saving grace for the entire coast.  The storm wobbled in a northerly direction, rather than its northwesterly direction, twice during the replacement and was unable to complete the transition.  The storm was also weakened down to Category 3 strength as well, and suddenly total havoc in Brevard County turned into "just" downed signs, trees, and power lines.

The next full moon is on Oct. 16, so Matthew arrived at literally the best possible time for such an event.  With the tides already at a low point, the combination of new moon and low tide helped protect the beaches in this regard. 

Here's a montage of storm damage in Brevard for your perusal.

Hurricane Matthew Blog - Part 4: Home, Safe and Sound

Before fleeing the storm, it was important to make sure the rain gauge would survive the event.  A bucket and a little Quik-crete came to the rescue for the good ol' Stratus!

 

The figure of sea surface temperatures and winds didn't go as planned.  NBDC Buoy 41009 was lost to Hurricane Matthew at 0830Z today.  The winds came in quickly and knocked the device right off its moorings.

The damage was minimal, but there was a large branch down in my yard, about 6 inches in diameter

I'm looking for others to share their stories of any interesting pre-storm preparations or post-storm findings!  If I get enough, I could make another blog post for all of it!

Hurricane Matthew Blog - Part 3

As daylight breaks, it appears that damage in the Melbourne area has been kept to a minimum.  We'll see as the day goes on and the storm lifts out.

Winds have grown in the last few hours, and there are widespread power outages.  Keep safe!

Hurricane Matthew Blog - Part 2

Sorry for not posting sooner... figures didn't like to work.

Check out the temperature drop over the last few hours... and it should plunge over the next few, which I hope will be around my next update.

Outer eyewall now affecting Cape Canaveral.  Remember to stay away/inside until authorities say is safe to come back/out.

Hurricane Matthew Blog - Part 1

If you're watching the Weather Channel right now, you may have heard Carl Parker essentially guarantee the death of any people who don't leave the barrier islands of Florida's east coast.  If you've read the NWS Melbourne updates, you may have read the line saying that remaining may result in "injury, death, or immense human suffering."

Take it seriously.

It's too late to leave, now, unless you're going to somewhere inland, like NW or SW Palm Bay.

Forecast is improved due to eyewall replacement.

NDBC buoy 41009 should nicely capture the hurricane passage... I'll try to work out a solution to include the charts I want to share throughout the passage of the storm.

More details later.  There is method to my madness.  Credits go to Mitch Roffer for unintentionally giving me this idea!

FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS

INIT  06/2100Z 26.2N  78.6W  120 KT 140 MPH
 12H  07/0600Z 27.6N  79.9W  115 KT 130 MPH
 24H  07/1800Z 29.6N  81.0W  110 KT 125 MPH
 36H  08/0600Z 31.2N  81.0W   95 KT 110 MPH
 48H  08/1800Z 32.1N  80.0W   80 KT  90 MPH
 72H  09/1800Z 31.5N  76.5W   60 KT  70 MPH
 96H  10/1800Z 29.0N  76.5W   50 KT  60 MPH
120H  11/1800Z 27.5N  77.5W   40 KT  45 MPH

And Eight Months Later

Summertime brings lots of good things to college students: mainly, freedom from classes; this also gives them time to imagine new unfounded fears of professors they've never met before.

If they're undergraduates.  By the time I reached graduate school, I realized that 99.999% of stuff on RateMyProfessors was students whining because they either (a) got caught cheating, or (b) were too lazy and didn't pay attention/take notes in class.  But that's neither here nor there!

For graduate students, that first summer is usually an important point in something special: thesis hours!  And I, like all thesis students, am doing lots and lots of... research!  And among the many things I have found during this research:

It's fun and enjoyable.  When you are doing something you enjoy and find interesting, suddenly it's a pleasure to be taking those credit hours.  And because it is enjoyable and engaging, you get a lot more work done in a day than you do when writing a research paper for Intro to Literature.  Talk to your professors; see which ones share your interests!

My current projects lie more in finding causes of temperature biases in sea surface temperature records.  In 6 months, when my thesis is all said and done, you'll get to hear it at the DMES graduate student seminar, though it'll be extremely difficult to put such a vast project with some potentially before-unused techniques into 15 minutes!

The best part of such research, particularly the amounts of programming in Fortran and statistical analysis in R, is that it prepares the student to go into any specialty of doctoral school.  Data analysis, historical research, instrumentation examination, and understanding regional and global climatology are all just a small part of what goes into such projects.  It's not that the data is the way it is; it's why the data is the way it is.

OK, this isn't much.  But I figured you deserved some kind of update after 8 months of silence!  Hopefully in the next week or so I will be able to share some stuff about severe storm thermodynamics and maybe show how it works in a real scenario from last week!

Doppler on Wheels Retrospective

As many people know, Doppler on Wheels #7 was in Melbourne, FL, from August 31-September 11.  During this time, Florida Tech faculty, students, and DOW operator Alicia took part in a series of Intensive Operation Periods (IOPs) during that time.  The weather supported IOPs on 6 days, Aug. 31, Sep. 4, Sep. 6, Sep. 8, Sep. 9, and Sep. 10.  Each day resulted in an adventure of some sort.

The purpose was for Dr. Lazarus (Dr. L) and his remote sensing students to get in on the act, but Dr. L opened it to graduate students via a special topics course plus any other students who were interested.

Before sharing some of the fun of the IOPs, let's check out DOW #7 first. 

Extended cab truck carrying a giant plate?

 For starters, it's a bit of an odd sight.  The DOW is essentially an International flat bed truck with extensions to the cab and a giant serving platter on a fancy stand at the back of the bed.  Upon further review, we find this dish to be a full radar!  And this is not just any radar.

Now we see it's a radar.

The DOW is equipped with a full radar and mesonet assembly.  So not only can we look at the atmosphere, we can look at the real time conditions at the surface.  These all work in sync with a series of computers to get the fastest possible data in the hands of the meteorologists on board.

A strange but effective little setup.  You will learn what this all is a little later.

Inside the DOW is all sorts of equipment.  The drivers seat is equipped with GPS and a series of switches that I didn't learn the full use of, but one of those switches is for the leveling jacks.  These jacks are important because the radar must be level to work effectively.  Thus with the push of a few [dozen] buttons, the truck can be leveled as needed to ensure accuracy of data collection.  The best way to do this, of course, is to park in a spot that is already near level.

Inside there are computers all over the place.  There is one screen in the passenger's seat plus there are over 10 screens in the cab.  There are two full stations, each equipped with the same sets of screens and hooked up so that each station is actually running from the same computers.  If a person at station #1 changes the radar setting, the person at station #2 will be able to watch the mouse move and click and see the changes.

Unity and order are of the utmost importance here.  The computers must be synced in the correct order, and the operators must be familiar with the computers.  Run-time errors can occur suddenly and mess up the functioning of the whole system because if one system boots out of order, the rest will not work either.

Monitoring screens

There are two monitors at the back of the picture above.  The lower screen tells many things about the DOW's conditions: equipment temperautres, atmospheric conditions, internal conditions, PRF settings, operating frequencies, etc.  This screen is the center of operations and tells the operator if everything is sync.  Keeping things in sync requires an internal wireless-type connection that communicates between the computers; when that connection goes, all of it goes. Thus the operator must always keep an eye on this.  The screen above has two graphs on it because it's an oscilloscope that measures the frequency of the signals.  If you look carefully, you will see two pulses, because the DOW is dual-pol AND dual-frequency!

Real-time operations, but DOW was down this day.

In the picture above, you will see real-time data collection from the final IOP DOW#7 went through during its stay in Melbourne.  On the screen in the center, there is a gray box; this box contains the radar settings.  These settings control the radars scanning operations, with setups possible for 360° scans, PPIs, RHIs, and sector scans of all sorts.  The screen on the right has the radar output, and this data is real time with information showing up on the screen almost instantaneously.

A weatherman's dream

As can be seen, the output is colorful.  On the left, the two screens are showing the full 360° profile of the radar scanning.  The two on the right show elevation scans.  On the top two are regular reflectivity, and the bottom two show velocity.  These screens, however, can be set to output any radar measured quantities the operator wants to see, which varies from situation to situation.  It is important to not that "north" on the radar output is NOT north, it is actually the direction the DOW truck is pointing toward.  Thus, if the truck is pointing east, then radar north is actually east.  Fortunately, there is software to fix this once data is off the truck and in the hands of the meteorologists.

Through the cage

When all else fails, look out the window; or through the porthole in the top of the truck.  Sometimes, especially with little to know visibility to the outside from the cab, the operators just need to know whats coming.  For this, they have a glass dome in the top for observing the surroundings.  Fortunately, there is a Faraday cage around the dome just in case the truck gets hit by lightning.

The transmitter

The transmitter is where the radar signal originates.  Yes, it is a black box made of steel and plywood, but inside that is a mess of electronics (and TWO 400-volt resistors!).  There are switches and knobs on here.  There are two important switches though: for turning the signal on and off.  The only knobs I actually know the functionality of are the frequency settings, because signals must be fine-tuned especially during a large-scale multi-DOW operation where interference can occur.  Scanning is optimum at a range of 50km or less, but the radar can go out to 100km.  This radar operates at higher frequencies (c-band) than standard NWS radars (s-band) because of this shorter range.

Malfunctions frequently happen, so there is strength in numbers.  When there are storms that a full profile is desired on, data from multiple radars can be combined to form a complete picture.  And experiments have been done on snow, pollution, orographic effects, tornadoes, hurricanes, and even fires!

Procedures for the IOPs were simple but needed to be followed carefully.  There would radiosonde launches from campus along with an on-campus rain gauge.  Lidar would be set up near the DOW to get wind profiles.  Then the rain gauge team would go out to a storm outside the DOW's cone of silence and find a storm to deploy the other rain gauges.

The wrong "Cone of Silence"

Now for some stories...

An IOP in Osceola County

First time I personally got to go out on an IOP was Friday, Sep. 4.  The goal for the day was chosen to park the truck in an open section in Deer Park, in eastern Osceola County.  This spot would allow for scans of just about anywhere within the county, and the chase was on!  And thus four people in a Mazda went exploring the backwoods of Osceola County, looking to drop a rain gauge in front of a storm.  Soon, they had picked their storm and went off in search of an open area in the storm's path.

The perfect spot

Rain gauge setup went perfectly and was completed just in time to get the first drops of rainfall.  The meteorologists checked their radars just in time to see the storm go from a nice bright yellow reflectivity into a fractured green reflectivity.  It was an adventure and worth some laughs, although it turned out we were in unfriendly territory.

During the Tuesday, Sep. 8 IOP, the perfect storm was found: a storm so powerful it would eventually require a Severe Thunderstorm Warning from the NWS.  This was perfect for both DOW data collection and transient luminous events (TLEs).  And then the DOW stopped working.  This is unfortunately one of the facts associated with DOW, so we would just have to keep on trying another day!  And the next two days would be fruitful indeed!

Fast forward to Thursday, Sep. 10 and what would be the final IOP.  Prof. Splitt, Camila, and the students going in the DOW started with rain gauge setup in the south part of campus.

Prof. Splitt puts the hammer down while Camila checks that the gauge is level.

And thus it was time to go into the DOW once again (thank you Dr. L for giving me another chance after the debacle on the Tuesday!).  This time there was success as the DOW caught real time formation and orphaning (anvil being shorn off) of pulse storms

Yes, this picture again.

And then when that was all said and done, we got to watch Dr. Weaver test his new piece of equipment, although this will get used more on Indian River Lagoon research.

 

None of this would have happened without the efforts of Dr. L, Prof. Splitt, Angela, and Alicia, the DOW operator.  They expounded much time and energy so that other people could be involved.  Without Dr. L and Prof. Splitt's grit and determination, there would have been no DOW here.

Thanks to every one of you!