Five Questions With: Isaac Ginis

Isaac Ginis, an internationally renowned hurricane expert, is a professor at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. / COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND
Isaac Ginis, an internationally renowned hurricane expert, is a professor at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. / COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

Isaac Ginis, an internationally renowned hurricane expert, is a professor at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. Ginis, who was the first scientist to show the role the ocean plays in the path and intensity of hurricanes, talks with Providence Business News about his research and the 2016 hurricane season.

PBN: How did you become interested in hurricane forecasting? What did you study to prepare yourself for this career?
GINIS:
I became interested in weather phenomena when I took physics in high school. At the time, I just wanted to understand how various things in nature worked. Unfortunately, most information about weather and hurricanes, whether in textbooks or on television, is merely descriptive: this is the sequence of events that we observe, and they lead to a hurricane. There is usually very little explanation of why it’s happening or the physics behind it. But, if we want to predict what a hurricane is going to do tomorrow or in the next few days, we have to understand the physical processes – from the microscopic to the global – that control its behavior. Weather and hurricane forecasting is a combination of physics, mathematics and computer science. In college, I studied all of these subjects.

PBN: How long have you been studying hurricanes? Have there been more in recent years, or has the number remained around the same?
GINIS:
I have been studying hurricanes for more than 30 years, primarily focusing on how hurricanes interact with the ocean and how the ocean impacts the hurricane intensity. My work has resulted in developing coupled hurricane-ocean interaction computer models that are used for operational forecasting by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center and Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center.
The Atlantic hurricane activity measured by frequency, intensity and duration has substantially increased since the early 1980s. This increase is linked, in part, to higher sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. The historic record of Atlantic hurricanes dating back to the mid-1800s indicates other decades of high activity. However, there are considerable uncertainties in the hurricane record prior to the satellite era.
PBN: How were you able to show the role the ocean plays in the path and intensity of hurricanes? How did you determine that connection?
GINIS:
Existing weather forecast models do a pretty good job of forecasting the track of a hurricane. It is more difficult to predict how strong a hurricane is going to be. 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, we need to calculate accurately how much energy the hurricane gains from and dissipates to the ocean. The key parameters that control the hurricane intensity are the temperatures of the ocean water, on and below the surface. Hurricane force winds create strong ocean currents and large waves that cool the water at the surface. The cool wake moderates the storm intensity. We know this from observing hurricanes and numerical modeling.

PBN: Tell me how you and your team upgraded the operational hurricane prediction models – what will they show now that they didn’t before?
GINIS:
For this hurricane season our URI team upgraded the ocean components of the two NOAA operational hurricane predictions models – the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting. We improved the way the ocean observations collected by aircraft, satellite and ocean buoys are ingested into the model to create more realistic initial ocean conditions. This should improve the intensity forecasts, especially for hurricanes that intensify rapidly. Last year, Hurricane Patricia in the eastern North Pacific intensified by an astonishing 105 knots from a Category 1 to a Category 5 during a 24-hour period. The operational hurricanes models did not do a good job in predicting such a rapid intensity change. I hope the forecast skill will be improved this year with the upgraded models and 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 from hurricanes.
PBN: Lastly, how does the 2016 hurricane season look?
GINIS:
This hurricane season is expected to be the most active since 2012. In its updated 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook, NOAA forecasters call for a 70 percent chance of 12-17 named storms, of which five to eight are expected to become hurricanes, including two to four major hurricanes.

- Advertisement -

No posts to display