Unsung Heroes Of ReanalysisAdded : Tuesday at 15:35 It's sort of taken for granted these days that much of the information which we see in the weather, for example hurricane tracks and synoptic charts are archived away so that they can be checked and viewed at a later date for things like comparisons etc.
But, we live in the 21st century with every device connected to the web with vast data storage capacities.
Cast your mind back to the early 1960's (If you can). No internet, grainy and poor quality satellite images and certainly no satellites which could monitor the weather on planet earth. Numerical weather forecasting was still in its infancy and model resolutions were laughably crude.
That was only sixty odd years ago. But, the guys at NOAA in the USA feel that sometimes we need to apply data collection to things like archived hurricane tracks to check if they were accurate or not.
A couple of weeks ago, they completed the Reanalysis of 1961 to 1965 Atlantic hurricane seasons. In fact, they have been checking back to the late 19th century using all types of observations, ship reports and archived descriptions of the weather.
It also enables us to continue to produce high quality and high resolution synoptic charts like this :-
Here is the new chart for 1961 :-
By doing this work, they have found :-
Nine new tropical storms and hurricanes during these five years were discovered and added to the database
Hurricane Debbie, 1961, was analyzed to have become extratropical near 43N (instead of striking Ireland as a hurricane at 55N)
Six hurricanes were identified as impacting the United States, one less than originally identified (Cindy, 1963 now considered a tropical storm)
And the hurricane with the worst impact on the United States during these five seasons was Betsy in 1965. It killed 75 people in Florida and Louisiana and was the first ever billion dollar hurricane for U.S. damage. Betsy was upgraded to a Category 4 from a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale at landfall in Louisiana.
There is a really good reason for doing this, apart from things like insurance purposes. It means that we can use the current science and technology and compare it better to archived data.
So, to the guys and girls at NOAA who painstakingly look through archives and data in order to bring us reanalysis, we salute you.
You can find out more about this project here : https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/data_sub/re_anal.html
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |