Hurricane Science: Great While It Lasted
- sciart0
- Jul 3
- 2 min read
Excerpt: For years, the National Hurricane Center has been improving the accuracy of its forecasts, and one short year ago, the United States was better at predicting storms’ tracks than it had ever been. But the Trump administration has been cutting the forecasting staff and budgets. And now these satellite data will be missing too. The U.S. is rapidly losing state-of-the-art hurricane forecasting, just in time for hurricane season’s busiest months.
The data were nice while we had them. After all, no one likes a surprise hurricane. When the sun goes down, convective storms over open ocean often grow stronger, juiced by the changing temperature dynamics. But that’s also when types of storm surveillance that rely on what’s visible are least able to determine what’s going on. Infrared imaging can see in the dark, but the picture is typically low-resolution and grainy, and can obscure key shapes. When the sun comes up, forecasters can suddenly be looking at a fully formed storm eye. Forecasters dread the “sunrise surprise,” which is exactly the sort of thing that the microwave imagery from SSMIS is most helpful in preventing. It gives a clearer picture, even through clouds, and even in the dark.
Plus, the technology is vital to picking up on telltale signs of rapid intensification, a phenomenon that has become more common in recent years, most notably with Hurricane Otis in 2023 and Hurricane Milton in 2024. Storms that intensify faster and reach higher peak intensities just before hitting land are a nightmare for forecasting, and climate scientists worry they will become only more common as the planet warms. Research suggests that certain signature formations in a storm could indicate that it may intensify rapidly, Andrew Hazelton, an associate scientist working in hurricane modeling and research at the University of Miami, told me. Those structures are simply easier to see with the SSMIS images.