At Mississippi State University, technology is proving to hold the key to a better understanding of hurricane development.
An effort led by MSU, the Northern Gulf Institute is working on new technology that can be used to better understand the development and movement of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.
The technology includes high-tech weather balloons and unmanned hurricane reconnaissance aircraft.
NGI, which is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is a cooperative institute whose partners include MSU, University of Southern Mississippi, Louisiana State University, Florida State University and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.
With the help of the MSU geosciences department, the institute combines data from a number of sources in order to paint a clearer picture of storm activity in the Gulf with the ultimate goal of increasing safety for people living in hurricane-prone areas.
Pat Fitzpatrick, Geosystems Research Institute associate research professor, said there are four key themes to the Gulf of Mexico.
“NGI focuses on four themes relevant to the northern Gulf of Mexico: ecosystem-based management, geospatial data/information and visualization in environmental science, climate change and climate variability effects on regional ecosystems and coastal hazards and resiliency,” he said.
He said the methods used by the institute to track and gain information about hurricanes comes from a variety of sources, which include satellite images, unmanned aircraft systems, land-based instruments and buoys.
Thanks to one system, these theories can be examined more thoroughly than ever before.
According to a MSU press release, the Virtual Environment for Real-Time Exploration allows for the creation of any type of virtual environment, including hurricane models. VERTEX uses the information amassed by NGI to create a computer-generated, three-dimensional image in which researchers can view the intricacies of storms.
Robert Moorhead, endowed professor of electrical and computer engineering, said geosystems research has many practical applications.
“It costs about $600,000 to evacuate one mile of coastline, so the more precise you can be in predicting where a hurricane will make landfall, how strong the winds will be and how high the surge will be, the more money and lives we can save,” he said.
GRI director and professor David Shaw said increasing the amount of information available about a storm can also bring those individuals living in hurricane-prone areas more peace of mind.
“Evacuating unnecessarily causes tremendous disruption in lives, but more importantly, seeing hurricanes change track unexpectedly can trap people, as we saw with [hurricanes] Katrina and Rita,” he said. “More accurate forecasting can help people know better how to protect their property from the level of the storm forecasted.”