1. Science Mission Directorate NASA Contribution to Hurricane Research Ramesh Kakar Weather Focus Area Leader TRMM, Aqua and GPM Program Scientist March 1, 2010

2. March 4, 2008 Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference, Charleston, SC NASA Hurricane Research Focus Areas Satellite remote sensing Field campaigns Numerical modeling Sensor development

3. Aqua Terra Aura GRACE ICESat CALIPSO CloudSat SORCE TRMM EO-1 Landsat-7 ACRIMSAT QuikSCAT Jason OSTM/Jason 2 2009

4. Aqua Terra Aura Landsat-7 ACRIMSAT Jason OSTM/Jason 2 2010 Glory SORCE TRMM Aquarius GRACE CALIPSO CloudSat EO-1

5. NASA Operating Missions

6. 6 ESD Missions in Development & Formulation GLORY Late 2010 NPP Sep 2011 AQUARIUS Late 2010 LDCM Dec 2012 SMAP Nov 2014 GPM Jul 2013 Nov 2014 ICESat-2 Late 2015

7. 7 TRMM Precipitation Radar View of Hurricane Katrina  Vertical rain structure as revealed by the TRMM Precipitation Radar in near-real time  TRMM is the only satellite that can provide rain structure information over open oceans, the breeding and intensification grounds of most tropical cyclones  Energy-releasing deep convective clouds (to 16 km) in the eyewall of Katrina on August 28 occurred while the storm was intensifying to Cat 5; TRMM data have established this association in many storms Deep eyewall tower Eye

8. 8 Improve analysis and prediction of storms at sea, which has benefited both maritime safety and economy through NASA-NOAA collaboration. Impact of QuikSCAT surface wind data Impact on surface pressure analysis With QuikSCAT data Control Impact on Hurricane Cindy forecast

9. 9 Packing Heat in the Gulf  Altimetry combined with SST data and a two-layer model is used to calculate Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential (TCHP)  TCHP is a measure of the oceanic heat content from the sea surface to the 26°C isotherm  Both hurricanes rapidly intensified to category 5 as they passed over the Loop Current and a warm ring, then diminished to category 4 and category 3, respectively, by the time they traveled over cooler waters  High values of TCHP may be linked to hurricane intensification. (17 % improvement in the 96 hour forecast of Hurricane Ivan )

10. 13.2 66.5102.8301.1Cntrl 11.460.489.0252.0Cntrl + MODIS 74645234Cases (#) 00-h24-h48-h120-hTime Average hurricane track errors (nm) 48.9 44.839.629.4Cntrl 51.155.260.470.6Cntrl + MODIS 74645234Cases (#) 00-h24-h48-h120-hTime Frequency of superior hurricane performance Percent of cases where the specified run had a more accurate hurricane position than the other run. Note: These cases are for hurricanes in the subtropics during 2004. The Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation found that MODIS winds also impact hurricane track forecasts. Impact in Tropics: GFS Model In both tables, the forecast time is the bottom row. The control run (Cntrl) did not assimilate the MODIS winds.

12. AIRS improves the ANALYSIS of Nargis The 3 tracks are obtained by tracking the center of Nargis in the 3 sets of ANALYSES produced by the CNTRL, RAD and AIRS Assimilations. The displacement error in the CNTRL Analysis often exceeds 150km but is substantially mitigated by AIRS.

13. NASA Hurricane Research Science Team (selected competitively) ROSES 08 (Science Team)ROSES 09 (Field/Instrument Team) Scott Braun NASA GSFCRichard BlakesleeNASA MSFC Shu-Hua Chen U. of California, DavisPaul BuiNASA ARC William Cotton Colorado State U.Stephen DurdenNASA JPL Robert Hart Florida State U. Michael Goodman NASA MSFC & Gerald Heymsfield NASA GSFC Svetla Hristova-Veleva NASA JPL Robert Houze U. of Washington Jeffrey HalversonUMBC/JCET Haiyan Jiang U. of Utah (to FIU) Andrew HeymsfieldNCAR Tiruvalam Krishnamurti Florida State U. Gerald Heymsfield NASA GSFC Greg McFarquhar U. of IllinoisSyed IsmailNASA LARC John Molinari U. of AlbanyMichael KavayaNASA LARC Michael Montgomery Naval Postgrad SchoolTiruvalam Krishnamurti Florida State U. Elizabeth Ritchie U. of ArizonaBjorn LambrigtsenNASA JPL Robert Rogers NOAA/AOML Nick Shay U of Miami Eric Smith NASA GSFC Christopher Thorncroft U. of Albany Edward Zipser U. of Utah

14. 1/8/0914 TOPICAL CYCLONE DATA PORTAL

15. The strengths that NASA brings to the interagency program for tropical cyclone research –expertise in satellite observations and retrievals –high-resolution modelling with emphasis on sensitivity to parameterizations and initial/boundary conditions –combining the two will help build the missing link between modelling and observations that will lead to hurricane forecast improvements How will the results of the research contribute to enhancing hurricane forecast and warning services? –making the hurricane portal operate in real time will put in the hands of the operational forecasters a wealth of satellite information and ensemble model runs, thus helping them in hurricane forecasting and warning services A Tropical Cyclone Information System – What strengths does NASA contribute?

16. 16 NASA Major Supercomputers Columbia Supercomputer (ranked 2 nd in late 2004) Based on SGI® NUMAflex™ architecture 20 SGI® Altix™ 3700 superclusters, each with 512 processors Global shared memory across 512 processors 10,240 Intel Itanium® 2 CPUs; Current processor speed: 1.5 gigahertz; Current cache: 6 megabytes 20 terabytes total memory; 1 terabyte of memory per 512 processors Pleiades Supercomputer (ranked 3 rd in late 2008) 92 Compute Cabinets (64 nodes per cabinet; 2,560 nodes; 2 quad-core processors per node) quad-core Xeon 5472 (Harpertown) CPUs, speed - 3GHz; Cache - 12MB per CPU 51,200 cores in total (512 cores per cabinet) 50+ TB memory in total, 1 (8) GB memory per core (node) 500+ TB disk spaces InfiniBand, 6,400 compute nodes 673 teraflops

17. Hurricane Bill GOES 3.5-km GEOS-5 72-hr forecast Initialized 2009-08-16 21z

18. Science Mission Directorate NASA Earth System Modeling in Support of NAMMA The 2006 NASA Modeling and Analysis Program (MAP’06) Heaviest Precipitation NW of Circulation Center X X  NASA GEOS-5 at ¼ degree resolution demonstrates skill in simulating AEW’s and tropical depressions during NAMMA  Provided value-added product to NAMMA Forecast Team  Joint GSFC-MSFC project Simulated Center Observed Center

19. NASA Hurricane Field Experiments 199820012005 2006 2010 GRIP Field programs coordinated with other Federal Agencies  NASA sponsored field campaigns have helped us develop a better understanding of many hurricane properties including inner core dynamics, rapid intensification and genesis

20. GRIP: (Hurricane) Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes Field Experiment Global Hawk (UAV) (240 hours)  Radar (Heymsfield/GSFC), Microwave Radiometers (Lambrigtsen/JPL), Dropsondes (NOAA), Electric Field (Blakeslee/MSFC)  Geosynchronous Orbit Simulation DC-8 four engine jet (120 hours)  Dual frequency precipitation radar (Durden/JPL)  Dropsondes (Halverson/UMBC), Variety of microphysics probes (Heymsfield/NCAR)  Lidars for 3-D Winds (Kavaya/LaRC) and for high vertical resolution measurements of aerosols and water vapor (Ismail/LaRC)  In-situ measurements of temperature, moisture and aerosols (Bui/ARC) Six to Eight week deployment centered on September 1, 2010 RED= IIP, GREEN= IIP+AITT Blue line: DC-8 range for 12-h flight, 6 h on station Red lines: GH range for 30-h flight with 10, 15 and 20 h on station Light blue X: Genesis locations for 1940-2006

21. 21 Summary  NASA satellite sensors are helping to expand weather/hurricane research frontiers  Columbia and Pleiades supercomputers support high resolution hurricane modeling  NASA sponsored field campaigns have helped us develop a better understanding of many hurricane properties including inner core dynamics, rapid intensification and genesis  NASA satellite sensor data is being under utilized in hurricane research (assimilation of satellite data has a much greater potential impact on the track and intensity forecasts)

22. 22 TRMM Data Used for Hurricane/Typhoon Monitoring TRMM TMI data used by NOAA and int’l agencies for tropical cyclone detection, location and intensity estimation--600 TRMM-based tropical cyclone “fixes” every year TRMM orbit advantageous for tropical cyclone monitoring--despite narrow swath it is always in tropics, sampling about same as one SSM/I over all tropics, but TRMM sampling best in 10-35º latitude storm band. TMI resolution twice as good as SSM/I, about same as AMSR. Precessing orbit provides off- time observations relative to sun-synchronous microwave observations. TRMM image from NRL Tropical Cyclone web site Hurricane Katrina

23. 23 Anomalies comparison: 8/4/2005 and 7/26/2006

24. Hurricane Bill August 2009 Warm Core 4 K at 850 hPa 9 K at 250 hPa Strong low-level Winds 50 m/s 46 m/s Observed Deep Central Pressure 959 hPa 947 hPa Observed 3-day Forecast 7-km GEOS-5 E-W Profiles GOES IR 14-km GEOS-5 7-km GEOS-5 3.5-km GEOS-5 4-day Forecast OLR