Check out the new video released by the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE)! It highlights the team’s exciting field work at sea and computer modeling efforts. The video can be viewed at http://vimeo.com/64470122
On Wednesday, January 9 more than 200 construction crew members attended a ceremony to celebrate the ‘Topping Off’ of the Marine Technology and Life Sciences Seawater Complex on the campus of UM’s Rosenstiel School. The ceremony is a builder’s tradition that marks when the last beam is placed at the top of a building. Speakers at the event included Mr. Dagoberto Diaz and Mr. Rex Kirby of Suffolk Construction; Dr. Michael Schmale of the University of Miami; and Chief Architect Peter Sollogub of Cambridge Seven Associates.
Dean Avissar and co-PI’s Mike Schmale and Brian Haus were among those who signed the beam which was hoisted into place after lunch. The beam was deposited next to an evergreen tree placed upon the structure to bring growth and good luck. Workers were also treated to a raffle with gifts from Gerdau – Tampa Reinforcing Steel, Lotspeich Company, Inc., Meisner Electric, Inc., Maxim Crane, Sun Belt Rental, J & J Caulking and the UM.
The new complex is located amid the thriving science community on Virginia Key, Fla. Funded in part through a $15 million U.S. Department of Commerce American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grant awarded by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the project will be completed in late 2013.
The Surge-Structure-Atmosphere Interaction (SUSTAIN) research laboratory occupying one of the two buildings will be the only facility in the world with a wind-wave-storm surge simulator capable of generating Category 5 hurricane force winds in a 3D environment. The 28,000 gallons of filtered seawater pumped into the building will allow scientists to directly observe and quantify critical storm factors such as sea spray and momentum transfers across the ocean’s surface in extreme wind conditions. A sophisticated wave generator will enable simulation of realistic storm surge impacts.
The Marine Life Sciences Center, occupying the other building, will provide a dedicated space for maintaining and studying living marine animals including fish, corals and sea hares. Coral reef research will focus on helping to assess and measure the effects of climate change and ocean acidification on critical reef-building processes. Scientists will also conduct fisheries and biological oceanography research to generate models of the biological and physical processes that affect the distribution of marine organisms. They will also study the impacts of environmental toxicants including heavy metals, pharmaceuticals and toxins on fishes and invertebrates, and use marine genomics to better understand how gene expression changes in marine populations chronically exposed to pollution.
RSMAS Professor Lisa Beal was in Cape Town, South Africa in Oct. 2012 for the AGU Chapman Conference on the Greater Agulhas System. The conference was the first of its kind on the African continent and the first conference wholly dedicated to the Agulhas System, which has recently been suggested to play an important role in global climate change (Beal et al., Nature, 2011).
Thanks to the efforts of Juliet Hermes and Thomas Mtontsi of the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) Drs. Meghan Cronin (NOAA) and I visited Mr. Ndemane’s science class at Sophumelela Secondary School in the township of Phillipi on the Cape Flats outside of Cape Town, South Africa this past October 2012.
During the presentation we introduced ocean currents to the learners, in particular the Agulhas Current, and discussed their impact on sea surface temperature (SST) and climate. I annotated ocean currents on blow-up globes to donate to the students as fun learning tools.
The high school students were clearly engaged and one learner stood up and thanked us for meeting with them and encouraging them to be scientists. Another learner from the SAEON program came up afterwards to ask for advice on a science fair project on climate change.
The class is involved in the NOAA Adopt A Drifter program (ADP), whereby three pairs of drifters were deployed in the Agulhas Current. Data from these drifters contribute to the NOAA Global Drifter Program (GDP), a component of the Global Ocean Observing System, and can be viewed at http://www.adp.noaa.gov/track_drifting_buoys.html.
I hope to see these learners again next February, when they have been invited to visit the R/V Knorr while she is in Cape Town, on the way to the final scientific cruise of the Agulhas Current Time-series experiment.
Lisa Beal, Ph.D. is an associate professor of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science and Principal Investigator of the Agulhas Current Time-series experiment http://act.rsmas.miami.edu/
Tropical cyclones are one of nature’s most destructive manifestations. Known as hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific, they operate as a heat engine, gaining energy from the warm ocean and converting it to extreme wind speeds. Tropical cyclones can grow to have radius upwards of 500 km and travel thousands of km gaining strength. When these storms make landfall their devastation is counted in both the loss of
life and the devastation to property and infrastructure. Hurricane Sandy’s landfall alone killed over 70 people, while the financial burden is estimated will be as much as $50 billion, $20 billion coming from damages and $10 billion to $30 billion due to loss of business.
Understanding the dynamics of tropical cyclones is one of scientists’ most pressing challenges. Assembling intricate information about the mechanisms which drive them is a critical component of accurately predict their movement and intensity. By improving our forecasts we can be primed to deal with future landfalling storms.
Understanding the processes that govern the transfer of energy between the ocean and atmosphere during tropical storms is the essence of my research at RSMAS. My working group is a component of the ITOP (Impact of Typhoons on the Ocean in the Pacific) campaign, which is devoted to understanding the ocean’s response to typhoons in the Western Pacific. The research is a multinational collaboration employing both field observations and models from many research institutions.
My contribution to the campaign started during the 2010 Pacific typhoon season when a team of A.M.P. students and research staff, working with Drs. Hans Graber and Will Drennan, helped deploy two mooring pairs in the Philippine Sea. The moorings were anchored ~740 miles east of Southern Taiwan. Each pair consisted of an Air-Sea Interaction Spar (ASIS) tethered to a moored Extreme Air-Sea Interaction (EASI) buoy. The platforms were equipped to make multiple atmospheric and oceanographic measurements.
Environmental conditions were monitored and recorded for over three months, a period which included the passage of three typhoons and one tropical storm. Sustained wind speeds over 26m/s and significant wave heights exceeding 10m were experienced.
Looking at the data we can see how dynamic the environment becomes with the passage of these storms. Along with increased wind speeds and wave height, we witnessed ocean and air temperatures changing, transformation of the ocean mixed layer structure, increased sea spray, pressure dropping, relative humidity increasing, and changes in the wind and wave direction, amongst other phenomena. With further investigation we’ll also learn how these storms affect aerosol composition, momentum and heat fluxes, and the evolution of the wave field.
Making in situ measurements at sea in such harsh conditions is extremely challenging, very few groups are equipped to do so, making this a very unique and valuable dataset. The potential to use this data to learn about how typhoon conditions affect the marine environment is effectively limitless. I am just one of a group of students and research staff who continue to investigate this data to uncover information about high wind speed boundary layer dynamics.
I was pleased to be recognized for my poster at the AMS conference on air-sea interaction, but I am one of many people who participated in the research. I was just lucky enough to be there to present some of our findings.
Henry Potter is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Marine Physics at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science.
The following interview is featured in Outside Online in a series of interviews about Hurricane Sandy. To read the interview in full, click here.
A video showing Sandy’s life from October 23 to October 31: As Hurricane Sandy moved up the East Coast, a ridge of high pressure north of New Foundland blocked her from moving north and generated clockwise winds that pushed her into the East Coast, where she morphed with a cold front that had been moving east across the Eastern U.S. “The big picture of what made Sandy move north and then curve back northwest was really not having anywhere else to go,” says Brian McNoldy.
It was as a nine-year-old kid in Reading, Pennsylvania, that University of Miami scientist Brian McNoldy developed a fascination with hurricanes. “I think most of us have a storm,” he says. “Mine was Hurricane Gloria, in 1985.”
TV newscasters warned about the impending winds and rain. Local officials cancelled school for a few days. When the storm hit, it knocked out power. McNoldy went outside. “I can still remember how strong the winds were,” he says. “We didn’t get hit by the eyewall—just by the rainbands, but even that was pretty impressive.”
After earning undergraduate degrees in physics and astronomy at Lycoming College, a graduate degree in atmospheric science at Colorado State University, and picking up research experience at Colorado State University, he landed at the University of Miami in January of 2012. “This is an up-and-coming school in hurricane research, and there’s a lot of momentum going here,” he says. “I’m happy to have the opportunity to be part of it.”
For his job, he works on something called “vortex initialization code” for a joint project with the Navy. It’s a series of sophisticated computer programs that allow scientists to take a crudely-represented hurricane out of a model analysis, replace it with a more realistic hurricane that has tuneable factors (such as intensity, size of the storm, etc.), and see how changes affect the forecast.
When he’s not working on the vortex code, he writes about hurricanes. “I started what, at the time, wasn’t called a blog, because they weren’t really there yet, in 1996,” he says. “For any storm—not even a storm, for any wave in the Atlantic, I would have my little list of people who were interested in what was going on, and I would send updates to them during hurricane season. I’ve been doing that for 16 years now.”
His audience has grown. From 2007 to 2010, he was invited to blog about hurricanes for The New York Times. In 2012, he started blogging for the Washington Post and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. On October 22, when Sandy was still Tropical Depression 18, he was one of the first to report on the likelihood of it turning into the Northeast U.S. with possibly devastating consequences. We caught up with him to learn a bit more about the science behind Sandy.
When did you start watching Sandy?
I think some of the models were picking up on something forming in the Western Caribbean probably by about October 12 or 13. Some models picked up, run after run, something that would form in the Western Caribbean, and then would move north toward Cuba. That persisted and they ended up being right. The National Hurricane Center issued the first advisory on Tropical Depression 18 on October 22, then upgraded it to Tropical Storm Sandy later the same day. It eventually headed north over Jamaica and Cuba. I thought, Wow, that’s extremely impressive for those models.
[Editor’s Note: Models are computer programs used to help forecast the formation and movement of tropical storms and hurricanes.]
On October 22, you blogged that there was a possibility it could hit the East Coast. How did you know that?
There are a few rather reliable global models. They’re models that run all the time, all year long, so they don’t focus on any one storm. They run for the entire globe, not just for North America. There are two types of runs these models can be configured to do. One is called a deterministic run and that’s where you get one forecast scenario. Then the other mode, and I think this is much more useful, especially at longer ranges where things become much more uncertain, is ensemble—where 20 or 40 or 50 runs can be done. They are not run at as high of a resolution as the deterministic run, otherwise it would take forever, but it’s still incredibly helpful to look at 20 runs.
Because you have variation? Do the ensemble runs include different winds, currents, and temperatures?
You can tweak all sorts of things to initialize the various ensemble members: the initial conditions, the inner-workings of the model itself, etc. The idea is to account for observational error, model error, and other sources of uncertainty. So you come up with 20-plus different ways to initialize the model and then let it run out in time. And then, given the very realistic spread of options, 15 of those ensemble members all recurve the storm back to the west when it reaches the East coast, and only five of them take it northeast. That certainly has some information content. And then, one run after the next, you can watch those. If all of the ensemble members start taking the same track, it doesn’t necessarily make them right, but it does mean it’s more likely to be right. You have much more confidence forecasting a track if the model guidance is in in good agreement. If it’s a 50/50 split, that’s a tough call.
To read the rest of the interview, click here.
Do you have any questions for Brian about Sandy or other Hurricanes? Leave them in the comments section below.
Joe Spring
Outside Magazine
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