Given my strong interest in both the space program as well as the computerized weather modeling and forecasting systems, my reflection here is going to deal mainly with a few points from these areas.

One of the first things that I noticed in preparing for this assignment and throughout the reading of the first two lessons was that the data for the tropical storms is far different in its timeliness than what I've seen in the past with typical "land based" observations such as those you would see in Mesoscale Meteorology. The data that you typically see for weather systems, over say the continental United States, is reported and available on a very consistent and highly reliable basis. For example, most of the reporting stations take observations at about 50 minutes past each hour 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is not the case with observational data for the tropical systems up to this point. In some cases there is no direct surface measurement data for a system for hundreds of miles if at all, and what data there is may come at irregular times and on a sporadic basis. Aircraft observations can be used to help this data "gap" but again, at most there are two or three flights into a storm in a day, and then only as it gets closer to land as aircraft are limited in their coverage by fuel and other considerations. Satellites can be used to fill in the areas that have no other coverage, but even they cannot get us the data consistency like we see with a continental weather network.  A perfect example of this is the scatterometer image we looked at earlier. Each satellite only makes two passes over a given location each day about 12 hours apart, and even then there are gaps in the areas that are covered in each pass. So, our first short coming from my viewpoint is the lack of a large amount of timely data for use in forecasting the storms.

The second observation that I have made from both the reading and the project is that we understand far less of these storms than we do for more traditional mid-latitude systems in terms of forecasting their path and intensity. My assumption is that this lower level of understanding of the processes that occur within these storms directly affects how well we can build computer models to predict their path and strength. This lower level of understanding combined with a smaller amount of data available mentioned above  might be two of the major reasons that our forecasting is not as accurate as it is for more typical mid-latitude systems.

The areas of the course so far that are the most interesting to me are the remote sensing capabilities of the satellites and the various other ways of obtaining data beyond the normal methods we are used to seeing for land based observations, so I'm eager to see what other things are out there and available in terms of data gathering and computer modeling to help analyze and predict these amazing storms.

(Click the Previous Page button to return to the wind analysis page or the Home Button to return to the beginning)