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23 August 2010
Tropics Are Heating Up
We are now in the peak of the hurricane season and the Tropical Atlantic is heating up. The second hurricane of the season formed this afternoon in the mid Atlantic. Hurricane Danielle will likely re-curve though and not affect North America. There is a slight chance of it approaching the NE coast of the U.S. or Canada. More interesting is the strong tropical wave coming off of Africa behind it. …
30 June 2010
Alex Approaching the Coast
Hurricane Alex is already producing flooding along the South Texas Coast as it nears landfall. Winds are at 90 mph in the eye wall near the center. The amount of storm surge is VERY dependent on the shape of ocean bottom and the angle the storm comes into the coast. So don’t assume that a category one storm will not produce serious flooding. It can. Meteorologist Alan Raymond of our …
29 June 2010
Alex Nearing Hurricane Strength in Gulf (Updated with AMSU Image)
Tropical Storm Alex is looking quite healthy this afternoon and has finally started moving. There seems to be a growing consensus among the models that Alex will come ashore in Mexico, well south of Brownsville, Texas. The latest movement, along with the new guidance, is a bit left of the last NHC track. Look for a shift the forecast a little southward in the next advisory. It is not out …
25 June 2010
Trouble Brewing In The Western Caribbean?
It seems we may have our first Atlantic Basin tropical system forming this evening. I’ve been here in Miami all week at the annual AMS Conference on Broadcast Meteorology. This is the 38th Broadcast Conference and one of the best I’ve attended. The Director of the National Hurricane Center and many of their forecasters put on an excellent seminar Wednesday on tropical meteorology. Director Bill Read also spoke at our …
28 May 2010
Hurricanes and The Oil Slick
I have had a TON of questions about the impact of a Gulf hurricane on the oil slick. The short answer to this is nobody really knows. NOAA has a short document out that covers the questions and what little IS known. Good science here: More soon…
27 May 2010
Possible HYPERACTIVE Hurricane Season- NOAA
In my last post I gave some of the reasons I thought we would see a very active hurricane season. Here is what the NOAA folks think. They released their forecast for the 2010 season today. As I expected it looks like it will be a mean year. Possibly one of the all time most active years. Here are NOAA’s numbers: An 85% chance of an above normal season. A …
26 May 2010
Open Season On Hurricanes (and they may be in a fighting mood.)
Hurricane season begins June 1st and NOAA’s hurricane experts will release their 2010 season forecast Friday 28 May. It’s not much of a secret among meteorologists what it will be. Likely BAD. Forecasting the number of hurricanes we will see each year is a very tricky project. There is some skill but changes in the sea surface temperatures and in the upper level wind shear during the summer months make …
5 May 2010
Jeremy Jackson- How We Wrecked The Oceans
This TED talk by coral reef expert Jeremy Jackson is a must watch state of the oceans. With the oil spill in the Gulf making news, it’s especially apropos.
16 August 2009
Hot Sea Running
A lot of tropical news this week. The 2009 hurricane season in the Atlantic has stirred to life quickly with two (Update Sunday: 3 !) tropical storms forming on Saturday. It’s not at all unusual to have little hurricane activity until August. The season runs from June 1st to November 30, but the prime season is from Aug, 1st to mid September. American forecasters have an old saying that there …
4 July 2009
A Picture Worth a Million Dollars (and it cost about that much too!)
To me the most fascinating part of synoptic forecasting is Satellite Meteorology. I can still remember working in Tulsa at KJRH TV where we had a GOES Unifax machine. Every 15 minutes a high resolution image would spit out. During the day the resolution was 1 km on a visible image. This was good enough to see jet contrails at times. One afternoon a large contrail was visible across Northeast …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.