AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina stunned the country. Since then, scientists have gotten a lot better at forecasting hurricanes and understanding how climate change influences them. But those scientists now fear that progress is in danger. NPR's Alejandra Borunda is here to explain. Hi, Alejandra.
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so just big picture here, how has hurricane science evolved since Katrina?
BORUNDA: I'll let Gabe Vecchi tell you. He's a climate and hurricane scientist at Princeton.
GABE VECCHI: It's been a great 20 years. It's been a pivotal 20 years.
BORUNDA: That's because right after Katrina, scientists from agencies like NOAA and universities and national labs all got together to work on something called the Hurricane Forecasting Improvement Project, or HFIP. And the project aimed to slash forecast error for both hurricane track, which is where a storm is going, and intensity by about 50% within 10 years. And it absolutely crushed those goals.
CHANG: Crushed - how did they crush those goals?
BORUNDA: Yeah. So they did two big things. First, scientists needed to build better computer models of the storms. And then they also needed better real observations of the storms because the best model in the world isn't super useful if you don't feed it good starting information. And HFIP and other federal efforts helped with both. HFIP was mostly on the modeling side, and other agencies helped improve the observations, like NOAA and the Department of Defense launched these special satellites in the 2010s. And hurricane scientist Jeff Masters explains them.
JEFF MASTERS: These use microwaves, the same things, you know, you use to run your microwave oven on. And they are able to do kind of a 3D MRI-like picture of the inside of a hurricane.
BORUNDA: And that microwave data helps a lot. And so does information from the Hurricane Hunter planes that fly through the storms getting Doppler radar images and also drop sensors down through the storm to the ocean surface.
CHANG: Wow. OK, so all of this has added a ton of new useful information, I imagine.
BORUNDA: Yeah, and it all adds up to big forecasting gains. By last year, a five-day-out forecast of both track and intensity was about equivalent to a two-day forecast in 2005.
CHANG: Oh, my God. That's a big jump. OK, well, what about climate change? Because I'm sure that has had an impact on hurricanes, right?
BORUNDA: Absolutely. And not only now do we have 20 more years of observations to understand it, but the theory is also way farther along. Here's Vecchi again.
VECCHI: So it's unambiguous that over the last 40 years - say, since the 1980s - hurricanes in the Atlantic have become more frequent, more intense, wetter.
BORUNDA: Overall, scientists say climate change kind of puts storm on steroids. And a hotter planet, and especially a hotter ocean, means storms can penetrate farther north too. And they're filled with a lot more water, which actually is what does most of the damage. Last year, for example, Hurricane Helene dropped an extra 10% more water than it would have otherwise.
CHANG: Geez. So can we expect hurricane forecasts to get even better in the future?
BORUNDA: So the Trump administration has slashed funding for many of the organizations critical to hurricane science. And so there's now some concern about even keeping up with the progress that already has been made. Kim Wood puts it this way. They're a hurricane scientist at the University of Arizona.
KIM WOOD: We didn't get this far by saying, yep, we figured out hurricanes. We're done. We have to continue investing in the observations, in the analysis of those observations.
BORUNDA: Because that progress has real value. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research last year found that improvements of forecasts save the country $2 billion per hurricane because people could better prepare for them. That's more than the budget of the whole Weather Service.
CHANG: Wow. That is NPR's Alejandra Borunda. Thank you so much, Alejandra.
BORUNDA: Yeah, glad to talk. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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