WEBVTT FILE

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[pulsing music plays]

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Norcross: A hurricane is mother nature's grandest, but most ferocious weather machine.

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Sullivan: A hurricane is two different things. If you're looking at it from above

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from the satellite down, a hurricane is a beautiful thing.

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It's a massive coil of clouds that is rotating, spinning like a top.

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Sims: When I look at images of hurricanes, I go through

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so many emotions. As a scientist, as a meteorologist,

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I'm like, "Wow, this is fascinating.

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You know, look at this beautiful storm.

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[sound of waves and wind] But then the human side of me is saying,

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"How can we make sure that people are evacuating, that people have somewhere to stay,

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that they have the money to feed their families once they leave their homes?"

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Sullivan: A hurricane on the ground

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that's a completely different thing, because all of that rotation

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you really feel as incredibly severe winds.

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They can be up to 150 or more miles per hour.

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You can have up to 40 inches of rain and the most deadly thing

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is that the updraft from the hurricane is actually pulling ocean swell

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up into it and so it creates a storm surge.

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up to 40 feet high

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DeMaria: And occasionally when the storms hit at a little higher latitude,

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, they can also spawn tornadoes in their fringe.

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So really the impacts are the wind, the storm surge, the heavy rainfall,

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and then occasionally severe weather that forms when they move inland.

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Sullivan: I feel like I got a deeper appreciation for hurricanes when I moved

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to Galveston, Texas.That entire city,

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it's almost like the ghosts of the 1900 hurricane … are still there

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because you see evidence of that storm, that particular

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famous storm that killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people.

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And so that is a very present thing in the city

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even to this day.

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Kirschbaum: That was a category four storm that hit Galveston

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on September 8th and there really was not a lot of information about

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what was happening in the Caribbean before the storm made landfall.

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Mandt: And the hurricane hit them totally unprepared

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and thousands of people lost their lives.

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Tremendous damage because it surprised everyone.

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With the onsets of satellites, that will never happen.

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Kim: The first leap forward would have been being able to see

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the entire planet from space in the first place.

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Prior to that, how would you know, for example, that a hurricane was coming?

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It would have been very difficult to know where it was coming, where it was going,

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how bad it was going to be.

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Mandt: So, that's one of the dramatic impacts, is satellite data … sort of like,

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your eyes in the sky to make sure that mother nature never can surprise you.

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Sims: When I was a child, I loved playing with magnifying glasses

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because you can zoom in and see so many fine details. And that's what we can do

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with the satellites that we have now, particularly the GOES-R series.

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We're getting 60 times more data now than what we were in the previous series.

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Sullivan: You know, the first satellites I worked with, the GOES-I through M,

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which were great satellites, but taking a picture of a globe every 25 minutes

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you know the hurricanes would be here. And then they're here and then they're here.

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And it's not like you're losing track of them. But the difference between that

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and being able to see, oh, it's swerving. It's curling. Oh, it's dying.

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We take a full disc picture of the entire hemisphere

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in five minutes. But we can also look at smaller areas.

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And you can scan that once every 30 seconds. You get to see

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as the hurricane eye wall was forming, you can see that actually forming in real time.

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The Earth looks alive … it looks like a living thing.

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[shimmering music]

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Mandt: So the polar orbiting satellites complement the geostationary,

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, since a geostationary like 24,000 miles up.

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While they get great pictures, it's really hard to measure

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what is the state of the atmosphere from that distance.

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So the polar orbiting are basically flying at little over 500 miles up.

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And when you're at that altitude you can sense

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what's in the atmosphere to a lot higher resolution.

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The JPSS satellite, is really, primary purpose

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is to take measurements of the temperature and moisture of the atmosphere

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to drive the weather forecast models.

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Kim: Two things that people always want to know about hurricanes

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are how strong is it, and where is it going to hit?

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And microwave sounders can certainly help with both of those.

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The ability to see through clouds becomes really important.

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If you've ever seen a picture of a hurricane from space,

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mostly what you're seeing is clouds.

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And you can get a better weather forecast, a better prediction of how strong the hurricane is

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and where it's going to hit, which direction it's going to go, if you could see through those clouds

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and see the structure of the atmosphere; maybe even the ocean conditions underneath that.

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And so microwave sensors allow you to do that kind of thing.

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Mandt: As you've seen, when they do the

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there's usually a cone of uncertainty they put in the path.

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We don't know exactly where it's going, but for the next three days

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or five days or seven days, here's the cone that it could go in.

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But you don't want to over-warn, right?

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You don't want to have the whole East Coast run in inland a hundred miles

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because of a hurricane, potential hurricane.

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You'd like that as precise as you can, so that only the people who are really going to be affected have to do something.

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The improved sensors that we've been flying

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allow a better understanding of the core of that hurricane

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and allow the forecasters to better predict precisely

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where that hurricane is going to hit. And when they do that

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then you can narrow and shrink that cone of uncertainty and give a better prediction.

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DeMaria: We hope to continue to improve the ability to do track forecasting.

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That's gotten so much better over the past couple of decades.

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Our five-day forecast is about as accurate as our two-day forecast

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was only about 20 years ago.

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Porter: And increasingly, people are listening

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to the forecast that they get from meteorologists. They have increased confidence,

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, they see the improvement in forecasts as it relates to hurricanes over the last couple of decades.

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And when a hurricane watch or hurricane warning goes into effect

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people take notice and they take action. And that's really encouraging to see.

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[music fades]

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