NASA's Hurricane Model Resolution Increases Nearly 10-Fold Since Katrina 89
zdburke writes: Thanks to improvements in satellites and on-the-ground computing power, NASA's ability to model hurricane data has come a long way in the ten years since Katrina devastated New Orleans. Their blog notes, "Today's models have up to ten times the resolution than those during Hurricane Katrina and allow for a more accurate look inside the hurricane. Imagine going from video game figures made of large chunky blocks to detailed human characters that visibly show beads of sweat on their forehead." Gizmodo covered the post too and added some technical details, noting that, "the supercomputer has more than 45,000 processor cores and runs at 1.995 petfalops."
Re: Pet Falop? (Score:1)
It's a five fold reproductive tube
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It's only 1.995 pet falops because one of the falops got its tail caught in a closing screen door and lost the tip. Maybe it'll grow back.
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It's been estimated that if you had temperature, pressure, and humidity readings for every cubic foot of atmosphere, you could only predict weather to about a month...if you had the computer power, which you wouldn't.
That's the problem with the famous butterfly effect. The tiniest deviation of a single molecule changes the weather patterns months down the road. The microscopic movements dictate large scale events down the road. The error scientists made was assuming small changes dissolved into statistic
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I was wondering about that. I don't do mathematical modeling, and my wife, who actually does mathematical modeling is currently on an airplane over the Atlantic coming home so I can't ask her.
Does higher resolution in the model necessarily translate to more accurate predic
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I'll bite.
With a higher resolution you can begin to resolve some of the dynamics of the eye wall, which gives you a much better idea about how the storm's intensity will develop.
There was a very good wunderground blog post about this last week with a /. story about it.
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I'm going to agree with the AC above me and say yes, increasing the resolution will generally result in a better forecast. There are two areas that generally can improve weather models: better initial conditions for the model and higher resolution.
Hurricane tracks are primarily influenced by large areas of high and low pressure and the accompanying upper-level winds. Even a coarse model with grid points every 50 km will probably produce a reasonably accurate representation of large features. Adding to the r
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Re:Hey, that's great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually we can predict pretty damn well. It depends on what you compare to: perfection, or what we could predict thirty years ago, or seventy-five years ago.
We're living in an era of rapid improvements in weather forecasting in terms of accuracy, precision and scope. Back in the 70s there was a perennial science fair project in which the student compared the accuracy of tomorrow's weather forecast to simply assuming that tomorrow would be like today. The answer back then was, it was about equally accurate. Today would be a totally different story. The forecasts we get for three days out is better than the forecast we used to get for tomorrow back in the 70s; people just haven't updated their thinking.
It's not surprising when you realize that the difference is satellite tracking, meteorological data networks, and incomprehensibly more powerful computers. Today's smart phones are roughly as powerful as the supercomputers of the 1980s.
Yes, you've increased the precision (Score:2)
But really, it was the accuracy that was the problem all along.
Re:Yes, you've increased the precision (Score:5, Interesting)
The path of a hurricane is somewhat unpredictable (been known to turn 90 degrees for no apparent reason).
The bigger issue which is harder to address is making homes that can "largely survive" being hit by a hurricane. The biggest issue is the junk flying around due to the strong winds (and storm surge if you are near the water). Once a building starts to disintegrate it provides the wind with ammunition for taking out other buildings.
In Australia when a cyclone is heading towards your community and potentially make land fall within 48 hours there is a whole pile of things that kick in for preparation (food, water, fuel, tie down and clean up - most people will be sent home by work during this period). At about six hours it is a case of bunker down and wait for it to go overhead.
Better prediction will reduce the amount of communities put on alert and associated disruption but unlikely to reduce the damage in affected areas (for that you need better building codes and people willing to take appropriate measures).
Re:Yes, you've increased the precision (Score:5, Insightful)
building a home that can handle the winds from a Category 1 storm isn't that hard.
It is when the primary criteria is "build it as cheaply as we can get away with and not have to bribe the building inspector". It's embarrassing the crap being slapped together today, especially to a former remodeler. When you step into a multi-million dollar house and notice that the counter tops aren't even level, the floor trim and cove molding rely on caulk and plastic wood to come together, and the ceiling is so wavy that the chandelier base plate doesn't even touch in places you know damn well that there aren't hurricane braces on the roof joists and the wall framing isn't anchored to the floor joists.
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I think that is another accuracy be precision issue. The storm clips are likely in place, because they are usually a specific inspection item. Being cheap means using all the lumber on the truck, and not rejecting the wavy boards. Building square, straight, and plumb buildings with dimensional lumber is hard. It is much easier to do with TJIs and Glulam, but tolerances are typically over 1/8" in framing.
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Although technically what you state is true (closer to perfect leads to further out predictions), there is a catch here. The rate between increases in precision and increases in accuracy is itself non-linear. Non-linear dynamical systems are governed by things called Lyapunov exponents. These define the relationship between the precision of your measurement and the accuracy of your prediction over time. Unfortunately, in the case of Earth's atmospheres the Lyapunov exponents are such that you would need an
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The path of a hurricane is somewhat unpredictable (been known to turn 90 degrees for no apparent reason).
We've gotten much better at predicting the paths of hurricanes which are, to a first degree of approximation, steered by larger-scale winds that have gotten easier to predict with time because of improved observational data feeding models, as well as the fact that they are easier to resolve and are dictated by things that don't require lots of parameterization (like what you have with convective clouds a
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You said a lot of good things in your post, but I'd like to add to it a bit. Your explanation of why we've made more gains in track forecasting than intensity forecasting is correct. You're also correct about the scale-dependence of the predicting the atmosphere.
Once we get down to a horizontal grid spacing of 4 km or so, we no longer parameterize thunderstorms. The grid spacing is sufficient to explicitly resolve them, so we turn the cumulus parameterization off. In older and coarser models, there is an as
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You may turn CP off but you're sure as hell still parameterizing (microphysics!! And just how many choices do you have for those fun knobs!). And 4km is still pretty damned coarse for thunderstorms. But yeah there is clearly more to surface wind intensity than eyewall replacement, that's just an example of something that is thought to play a role and that is definitely handled better with finer meshes (tropical is not my expertise).
We're doing much better, but we've still got a lot of work to do to get hurr
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In a 3D model, 8x resolution is just 2x along each axis. The summary (and possibly the article) makes it seem like they used to be very block but now its ultra sharp when in reality if it used to be 1km resolution now its 0.46km resolution.
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The 3D model does not have the same resolution in the Z as it does in the X and Y. If it did you'd be way out in space. The number of Z levels may well have doubled, but more likely from about 10 to about 20 of them.
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Well, nice but that was not the problem... (Score:3)
Nice and all, but the model resolution was never the problem. E.g. Katrina was going to hit whatever model we had, with not much warning. The problem was the response.
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People forget we had another disaster under Clinton, where it became obvious the head of FEMA was just a political spoils job, an incompetent. Officials swore no more! All FEMA appointees from here on out will be competent managers!
"You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!"
Re:Well, nice but that was not the problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The poor couldn't leave, because free/cheap transportation wasn't available except in a few situations (church buses and the like). ( And if you're poor in Louisiana you're about as poor as you can get in the US.) Even many of the nursing homes weren't evacuated unless they were able to afford to arrange specialty transportation.
Yeah, it would have been nice if more people had evacuated, but after a series of free market fanatics running the state government there just wasn't the capacity.
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An even more insurmountable problem is that New Orleans only has about 16-20 lanes of highway going out of it, thanks to all the surrounding wetlands. I put it to you that getting 500,000 (maybe more) people out on 20 lanes in 72 hours is, in fact, impossible at any price. Starting 24 hours before Katrina, I-10 was total parking lot from well south of Baton Rouge to the Texas state line (at least this was reported on the radio). Under normal conditions, this is a 4.5 hour drive.
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I thought the problem was the many decades of managing the Mississippi which led to the ongoing disappearance of the marshes plus the development of the city on a very low area that was likely to flood.
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The problem was the response.
The problem was the decision not to shore up the levees. The problem is cutting corners to save pennies. The bigger problem is that we let them. Hurricanes don't have to be anything more than a nuisance. The disaster is man made [youtube.com].
Now (Score:2)
Beware the dreaded petfalop, my son! (Score:1)
How fast can 45K cores do auto-correct?
I may be drunk, but... (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell is a petfalop?
HAHAHA!
Hooray beer!
Why are typos so much funnier when drunk?
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The computer saves the generated output in petafiles.
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Re:Still wouldn't have made Ray Nagin competent (Score:5, Informative)
The school buses didn't belong to the school district, much less the city. These free-market idiots who believe in privatizing everything to make it more expensive and less efficient had ensured that there were no school buses available to move people. Nagin was an idiot, but that was one failure that can't be laid at his feet.
More disturbing to me was that Cuba had sent a ship full of doctors and Venezuela had sent a tanker full of fuel for hospital generators, and both were turned back by the Navy. Most of the hospitals stayed staffed by nurses and candy stripers (the doctors could afford to evacuate) until the All Clear, and the generators ran out of fuel until Halliburton trucks could get to them (even domestic trucks of donated fuel were turned back because only authorized vendors selling at elevated prices were allowed in).
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Not any more, the Alternet Forums are long gone. One of the regular posters there owned a petroleum distributorship in Pennsylvania. They drove a truck of diesel down with the intent of donating it to one of the hospitals, but were turned back. They were specifically told that only trucks contracted by Halliburton or KBR (can't remember which) were being allowed in. The only links I can find at the moment are for the Walmart trucks full of water being refused entry, and qualified first responders being m
What about the Gulf Coast of Mississippi??? (Score:2)
Hurricanes are wet and noisy. (Score:2)
If one is approaching, be sure to stock up on plenty of munchies, beer and weed. Use a bunch of car batteries through an inverter to avoid the clanking, rattling generator.
What else is there to know? I mean, besides not building matchstick homes so close to the open seas where there are hurricanes? And certainly not below sea level! What were they thinking? Trying to save a few pennies? You don't need high resolution to know that doing stuff on the cheap is pretty risky business. Though I'm sure the picture
What was wrong... (Score:2)
What was wrong with Katrina-era models? We knew several days before it hit shore how bad Katrina was going to be... The issue was the pitiful evacuation, not the lack of advance notice.
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Actually, no, that's not correct at all. Even as Katrina was crossing south Florida, three day forecasts were pretty far off. The forecasts certainly didn't call for it to become a major hurricane. Here are some forecast graphics for you:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/graphics/AT12/10.AL1205W5.GIF [noaa.gov]
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/graphics/AT12/10.AL1205I.GIF [noaa.gov]
The three day forecast called for a category 2 hurricane moving in the general direction of Panama City, FL. The rapid intensification of
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Nothing excuses Ray Nagin's incompetence once hurricane watches and warnings were issued for Louisiana. Although Nagin did encourage evacuation, he also promised residents who didn't evacuate that, "we will take care of you." The city didn't keep that promise and it certainly gave people incentive to stay when they might have otherwise evacuated. Furthermore, the hurricane wasn't actually what killed people in New Orleans. The levees broke because they weren't properly designed and maintained, despite ample
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Prevention (Score:3)
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assuming the number of hurricanes doesn't decrease with the solar slowdown:
Don't worry, you will have other hurricanes.
So what...? (Score:2)
"the supercomputer has more than 45,000 processor cores and runs at petfalops."
So what happened here? Is this like the cubic centimeter limits for motors where if you go over a size limit new rules go into effect? Like you don't have to pay to register your supercomputer if it is under 2.000 "petfalops" (whatever the hell that is)?
...or did someone realize after it was built that Excel had been rounding on them, and they were 113 processors short of the 2 "petfalops" system specified in the bid?
Unnecessary effort. (Score:2)