"Nadine" Soon to Turn Back North.... Large Disturbance in E. Atlantic.... Help Scientists With Historical Hurricane Data
Take note of the ragged cut-off & bad data over the far E. Atlantic. The problem is that the GOES-13 satellite is malfunctioning. Work is ongoing but for the time being the satellite -- GOES-15 -- that usually covers the Western U.S. & parts of the Pacific has been moved east to cover more of the Atlantic Basin. Click here for info. from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Studies (CIMSS) & to view other satellite sectors.
"Nadine" is completing its loop & will finally make a turn to the northeast then north in the N. Atlantic. The storm should finally become extratropical later this week as it moves northeast then over open water. No threat to Bermuda or the U.S. but "Nadine" will make a second hit on the Azores in late Wed.-early Fri. with gusty winds & heavy rain.
A large disturbance moving from the E. Atlantic in the Central Atlantic has the potential for slow development as the disturbance moves W/NW. All indciations are this is a sharp recurvature over the open Atlantic (typical for this time of year).
From NOAA:
A new website has gone into operation that could help climate scientists estimate the historical intensities of hurricanes around the world faster than before - and the public is invited to help. The website, CycloneCenter.org -- click here, allows volunteers to examine color-enhanced images from 30 years of tropical cyclones taken from the archives of NOAA's Hurricane Satellite Data system. Then, site users will be guided through a process to analyze a specific hurricane image and answer questions, using a simplified technique for estimating the maximum surface wind speed of tropical cyclones.
The method for determining the strength of tropical cyclones has been applied differently around the world and has changed over time. That inconsistency has led to uncertainties in the global historical record of tropical cyclone activity, especially in parts of the world where additional data sources such as aircraft reconnaissance are not available. After many people review the same image, scientists will then use that feedback to come up with new estimates of a cyclone's intensity.
CycloneCenter.org allows volunteers to examine color-enhanced images from 30 years of tropical cyclones taken from the archives of NOAA's Hurricane Satellite Data system. (Credit: NOAA)
"The human eye can best recognize patterns in storm imagery, which is why we are enlisting the public to identify image patterns and build a consistent analysis of tropical cyclone data worldwide," said Chris Hennon, Ph.D., an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and a principal investigator for this project.
The end product will be a new global tropical cyclone data set that will provide 3-hourly tropical cyclone intensity estimates, confidence intervals, and a wealth of other metadata that could not be realistically obtained in any other fashion. Using citizen scientists could allow meteorologists to make more rapid progress on the analysis of historical tropical cyclone data. The new data set will be used by NOAA climate scientists and other researchers in an attempt to better understand and research global tropical cyclone activity.
"The main advantage of a citizen science approach is that dozens of people, rather than one or two, will analyze a single image," said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., director, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. "Scientists will be able to use the analysis by a large number of people to better define the accuracy of the historical intensity of tropical cyclones."
Hennon added: "We have nearly 300,000 hurricane images from around the world - more than a full length motion picture has movie frames. By collaborating with the public, we hope to perform more than a million classifications in two months, something that would take a team of analysts more than a decade to accomplish."
NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) and Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC) tropical cyclone experts traditionally examine data from satellites as well as numerous other sources in the construction of the historical record. NHC and CPHC have no current plans for the project's results to affect the historical tropical cyclone record for the North Atlantic and eastern and central North Pacific basins served by NHC and CPHC.
CycloneCenter.org was developed in partnership with the Citizen Science Alliance, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites and UNC Asheville.
CycloneCenter.org is part of the Zooniverse.org network of public participation projects that includes Old Weather.org, which aims to rescue weather records contained in World War I ships' logs. More than 1 million logbook pages have been transcribed so far. The original Zooniverse project, Galaxyzoo.org, was launched in 2007 wherein a total of more than 400,000 people have registered to take part and have classified more than 50 million images of galaxies in its first year alone.
