Luis Hernandez: Hurricane season won’t end until the end of November. The last hurricane to hit Rhode Island was Sandy in 2012. Henri was a close call when it made landfall as a tropical storm in 2021. Meteorologists and hurricane experts have two major goals when it comes to understanding hurricanes.
Isaac Ginis: We typically want to answer two questions, where the storm is going and how powerful the storm is going to be. So my research has been mostly focusing on the second question, improving our understanding and prediction scale, how strong the hurricane is going to be, particularly when a hurricane makes landfall.
Luis H: That’s an expert in hurricanes from the University of Rhode Island.
Isaac Ginis: My name is Isaac Ginis, I’m a professor of oceanography,
Luis H: We spoke with professor Ginis about his research to better predict the damage a storm could cause, as well as damage from nor’easters. He started by telling us something he’s been trying to tell everyone for a while when it comes to predicting these sorts of things.
Isaac Ginis: I was one of the first scientists who argue that we need to make predictions of the ocean temperature underneath the storm. Because it turns out that the hurricanes actually change the temperature of the water underneath. And we need to understand the reason why the temperature is changing, and also develop computer models to predict the change.
Luis H: How good are we, how good is the science at predicting what a storm is going to do?
Isaac Ginis: I think we have made tremendous improvements in predicting the hurricane track, we now can predict the horican future direction or path five days in advance with the same accuracy as we predicted the path of three days in advance 10 years ago.
Luis H: Can you tell me a little bit about R-I Champ? This is some of the latest work that you and your team are working on?
Isaac Ginis: Right. So we’ve been working on the developing Rhode Island coastal hazard analysis, modeling and prediction or R-I Champ system, focusing to help emergency managers to gather more local scale, actionable, information about potential impacts of the storms, for when they make landfall. So there’s one thing to predict what we’ll call the hazard which is the wind, coastal flooding waves. But another thing is to predict what those hazards are, what kind of impact they will have when they make landfall. That is the most important information for the decision makers to know what actually they should anticipate or expect. The storm will do. So this R-I Champ connects very high resolution modeling of the hazards with an impact analysis that we do together with collaborators here. Newest Rhode Island, where we collect the vulnerability data about critical infrastructure facilities directly from facility managers, for example, what is the height of the generator at that particular facility or hospital? Or what is the height of the transformer that provides the power to the facility. And by knowing the height of those structures, we can make a prediction when these particular facilities can be flooded.
Luis H: I read something that you had said that’s very interesting. You said that Rhode Island doesn’t get hit that often. I’m from Florida. I’ve been through a lot of them. And one of the things that could be scary is not being prepared. Do you think Rhode Island’s prepared in case one day it does happen?
Isaac Ginis: I believe actually the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency is quite well prepared in terms of their knowledge and expertise, dealing with significant storms. I’m not so sure about the Rhode Island population. That’s my biggest concern about people being informed what to expect and making these decisions well in advance before the storm makes landfall. I always give an example of the 1938 storm that came to Rhode Island with extremely fast forward speed, like an express train. And it took only less than 24 hours for the storm to reach Rhode Island for the Bahamas. So we might not have much time to make decisions. Individually, our families need to stay safe and deal with extreme storm storms like the 1938 Storm. So that was my biggest concern. I think that the fact is that we don’t have these storms often. It’s one of the reasons. But these days we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. I think that it’s an example of the extreme storm and many people don’t realize it could be much worse than Hurricane Sandy.
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