2 Days of Tropical Meteorology at the GHC12

Tropical Meteorology

The able and competent forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are proud of their accomplishments but humbled and honest about their failures. While their record on predicting the track of the storm has shown slow but steady improvement the last decade their skill in predicting the intensity of the storm over the same period has been abysmal.

The science and forecasting tools (satellites, planes, dropsondes, computer models) have improved dramatically, just not in the area of intensity forcasts. The average forcast error at 24 hous before impact remains at 10 knots. The rule of thumb I learned 15 years ago, plan for an impact one category higher than forecast, still applies. The NHC documented that they are wrong by 2 categories 5-10% of the time.

Here are some notable comments that I wrote down over the last two days of listening to NHC and National Weather Service forecasters here the the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Ft. Lauderdale:

• The Saffir Simpson Scale (SSS) is now used only to categorize wind speed. A cyclone has other impacts, inland flooding, surge or tornadoes, that must be considered separately.
• Freshwater flooding from rainfall is the biggest killer in cyclones.
• Cyclone induced tornadoes most often come in an extended rain ban in the right front quadrant of the storm. 
• The size and strength of a hurricane not a reliable indicator on inland flooding. Get the six hour flash flood guidance values from your river forecast center.
• The Tropical Storm Surge Probabilities Product (created in 2008) is produced only when there is an active storm threatening land. This looked like a good product to evaluate the dangers of surge during an event, but I wasn't very familiar with it. That could be because Florida hasn't been hit by a storm since 2005.
• The SSS for each storm is derived from the highest measured estimate of one minute intensity wind speed. This intense wind speed is normally only in a very small part of the right front quadrant of the storm. Thus, category 4 intensity winds, for example, may only make up 5% of the total hurricane force winds generated  by the storm. 

A National Mass Care Exercise - Hurricane Gispert

The draft of the new "National Mass Care Strategy" recommends that the nation conduct "an annual national Mass Care System exercise that focuses on state-to-federal coordination systems and integrating staff from key federal, NGO, faith based organizations and the private sector into an effective Mass Care Multi-Agency coordination system." The state of Florida  will conduct just such an exercise in conjunction with the annual State Hurricane Exercise in Tallahassee May 21-24, 2012.

Over 70 persons (50 of which are traveling to the site from out-of-town) from 29 different federal, state, NGO and private sector organizations representing the nation's Whole of Community will participate in the exercise as player, evaluator or controller. The focus of the exercise will be on building the state and the nation's capability to deliver Mass Care Services in furtherance of the National Preparedness Goal.

The scenario for the exercise involves the landfall of Hurricane Gispert in the Tampa Bay area as a major storm. Such an impact on a large, urban, coastal community would require a coordinated, national mass care response. The purpose of the exercise is to test the systems, processes and procedures necessary to coordinate a mass care event of this magnitude.

Many of these procedural documents are new, still in draft form, and have never been tested before. They include:
1) "The Acquisition and Employment of Federal Mass Care Resources, A State Template,"
2) "The State of Florida Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force Standard Operating Guide,"
3) "Draft Multi-Agency Sheltering Task Force Guidance Document,"
4) "Household Disaster Feeding Guidance Document."

Three of these documents are draft national templates that will be refined based on participant feedback during and after the exercise. Once refined, the documents will be made available on the National Mass Care Strategy website for use by the national mass care community.

The exercise will have 3 evaluators to ensure that the lessons learned are captured. There will be a daily and a final "hot wash" to ensure that this critical information is captured while still fresh on the participants minds. The results of these efforts will be incorporated into the After Action Report. This document will also be made available to the nation via the Web.

The ambitious nature of this exercise, both in the number of participants and the complexity of the tasks to be performed, guarantees that this endeavor will be challenging for all participants. This is the best way for us to prepare.

Home cooking in Sokone, Senegal

Observing the  daily, laborious, backbreaking job of preparing lunch and then dinner for 25 people at Jamie's home in Senegal was one of the most interesting parts of my visit. The cooks were a crew of young women, supervised by Jamie's host sister Sophia, the eldest sibling in the family and the one who ran the household on behalf of her mother.

The women at work cooking another meal.

The count for each meal was about 25 and could vary from that number by five either way. The patriarch and matriarch of the family ruled over a household compound filled with children, grandchildren, students from the country living as boarders and one Peace Corps Volunteer. Almost all of the household were women and children: the men worked in other towns and only came to visit.

The menu was some unvarying combination of rice, fish or chicken, onion and some other vegetable. On rare occasions (like our visit) they prepared noodles.  The family was Muslim so pork wasn't served, even though pigs were raised and no doubt eaten by members of the country's minority Christian population. The rice came from Thailand in 100 pound bags, examples of which I observed in abundance on trucks and donkey carts throughout the country.

Jamie's host sister Sophia

Sophia starts off each day with a bean sandwich from her mother's stand at the front of the house before heading to the market to buy the vegetables and chicken or fish for the day's meals. The family has no freezer or refrigerator so items other than staples like rice must be purchased daily. The morning we accompanied Sophia to the market was a Wednesday, the big market day of the week, so Sophia dressed for the varied social aspects of the visit.

 The day was already warm as Jamie, Gale, Sophia and I left the bean sandwich stand for the 20 minute walk to the market. On the main street we joined a stream of empty handed pedestrians moving to the market to make a purchase and a series of heavily laden carts drawn by donkeys, horses or oxen with products destined for sale. The market itself was a riot of color and activity.

Scene at the market in Sokone. The colorful clothing is made with the famous

Senegal “waxed” fabric.

Buying food at the market in Sokone on market day. Note the dried fish and the

scales in front of the seated woman with the blue turban.

The kitchen in the compound of my son Jamie’s host family in Sokone.

Cutting up the vegetables for the meal. 

Dividing the food in the communal bowls.

There was no running water in the household. All water was brought in buckets from a public spigot on the street. Goats, chickens and ducks shared the interior compound with the family. There was no chopping of vegetables on a cutting board. The vegetables were cut by  hand over a bowl with a small knife. I asked a young woman in my broken French, as she was busily engaged in this task, if this didn't result in cuts on her hands. She nodded and showed me a example.

Cooking the food was a laborious, time consuming task, with the women spending too much time (in my view) either squatting by or bent over a pot of bubbling liquid. Once the food is cooked the rice  is put into the communal bowls from which it is eaten by the family. Pieces of chicken are apportioned to each bowl. Almost everyone eats from the bowl with their right hand. The family divides by age and sex to their assigned bowl. 

As guests, we were given spoons to eat with. Jamie, Gale and I ate from a bowl with the mother and father of the family, a duck darting between my feet to catch any stray grains of rice that missed the passage from bowl to mouth. The mother tore off bits of chicken with her right hand and laid the pieces before us to eat. She squeezed the rice into a ball with her hand and then ate by passing the ball with a vertical motion in front of her mouth, almost as if she was licking her hand. Except her hand never touched her mouth, because she was using the same hand to divide the food in the communal bowl. She ate sparingly until she saw that we had our fill. 

The food was delicious.

One of the meals that we shared with Jamie's family.

Ecotouriism and the bats in the beobab tree

At the end of our arduous first day of travel in Senegal we arrived at an island outside the town of Toubacouba on the southwestern coast. The Saloume River created a mangrove tree covered delta that came under the ecological protection of the government in 2003.

We stayed in a thatched hut on beds with mattresses and mosquito nets. We had started our malaria medicine 48 hours prior to our departure but we still needed to avoid the mosquitoes. The electricity came from solar panels and the water from overhead tanks. The bathroom, such as it was, had no roof.

We slept the sleep of the exhausted and awoke to a clear, cool, fresh morning and a beautiful view of the salt water and mangrove trees of the delta. Except for the occasional splashes of fish feeding in the water below our world was silent.

Unsure of when lunch was to start, we arrived an hour and a half early. While waiting, Jamie and I cleaned out the island's supply of Flag brand beer and started on the Gazelle. For lunch we had a traditional Senegalese lunch of rice and fish called ceebu jen. During the heat of the day we slept and swam and returned the to the dining room for a late (for me) supper.

When darkness fell we armed ourselves with mosquito repellant and sat in wooden chairs by our hut, gazing at the night sky. Gale wanted to see a shooting star. That's when the bats showed up.

"They live in a beobab tree over there," Jamie said, pointing to his right.

I briefly thought about rising from my wooden chair to investigate. Sanity and lethargy prevailed. My weekly quota of adventures had been exhausted the previous day.

The bats were dark shadows that flickered above or even between us as a few flew under the roof. That was the closest that I had ever been to a bat in my life. Gale quoted her kindergarten statistic on how many mosquitoes a bat consumed in an evening. 

A shooting star fell. We went to bed.

Day 2 of the National Hurricane Exercise

The highlight of the day was the presentations of Bill Read, Director of the National Hurricane Center, and Craig Fugate, the FEMA Administrator. They both emphasized the same point, that the devastating inland flooding that occurred in the Northeast as a result of Hurricane Irene was forecast well in advance.

Bill Read showed a 5 day inundation forecast map for Irene that was close to what actually occurred. He raised the question: why was the inland flooding a surprise to the public and some emergency managers? He offered the additional point that the areas that ultimately experienced record flooding (northern New Jersey, upstate New York, Vermont) had received considerable rainfall in the previous 10 days and the ground was saturated. Thus, it should have been no surprise that the large quantities of tropical moisture that Irene dumped on these areas created destructive flooding.

Craig Fugate pushed forward the suggestion that the lessons of Katrina may have led people to concentrate on the storm surge threat from Irene to the exclusion of the inland flooding threat. Bill Read raised the possibility that the media focus on the beach, with constant footage of meteorologists before a backdrop of a foaming ocean, may have contributed to the diminishment of the inland flooding threat.

Bill Read also asked: Did the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center do a poor job of communicating the threat? 

In an admirable piece of self-criticism, Bill showed a slide that highlighted how the NHC consistently overestimated the strength of Irene. He admitted that after much study there were unable to determine the source of their error. The barometric pressure of the storm is normally highly correlated with the intensity of the wind. In the case of Irene, this correlation did not hold.

Day 1 at the National Hurricane Conference

The first day of the National Hurricane Conference was a serious of vivid and engaging sessions on the response to Hurricane Irene from our friends in the Northeast. The New York City (NYC) Office of Emergency Management as well as representatives from the states of NJ, CT and NY filled us in as they related their challenges in sheltering and making evacuation decisions.

As I told one of them, "Welcome to our life here on the Gulf Coast."

In 2005, after witnessing the horrific images from Hurricane Katrina, the NYC OEM began doing the difficult but necessary planning required to evacuate and shelter the 8 million people in the metro area. Some of the key players in this effort, the Logistics Chief for NYC OEM, the Emergency Management Director for the NYC Department of Education, and a representative from Menlo Worldwide Logistics, spoke about their multi-year effort to develop a plan and the days that they had to execute it.

NYC has a series of shelter hubs throughout the city. They tried to make the hub locations as close to walking distance as possible. As the people arrive at the hubs, they are transported by city buses to the shelters. The supplies for all these shelters must be loaded from central warehouses and transported by truck through the city to the shelter locations.

The shelters are located in schools. The average age of the school buildings is 70 years, so many are missing conveniences such as elevators, loading docks or even front doors wide enough to admit palletized loads of freight. Visualize, if you will, hauling a truckload of bottled water, by hand, a case at a time, up several flights of stairs. Multiply that by the cots, food and other supplies necessary to stock each shelter and you get an idea of the effort required.

They talked about how their timelines to deploy these resources didn't exactly match with the Mayor's timeline for declaring a disaster. Thanks to their excellent planning, the resources were deployed to the right places at the correct times. What they hadn't planned for was picking all these supplies up again. Demobilizing the resources proved to be the more daunting task, but they worked thought it.

The discussions about the gut wrenching task of making the local evacuation decision were particularly interesting. They talked about evacuating all the hospitals and nursing homes in the designated zone. What really had an impact on everyone, the public and emergency managers alike, was when the announcements came that the subways, buses and trains were going to shut down as the storm approached. This was always in the plan, but no one could believe that it would actually happen.

I told them all that they did a great job, but they were lucky that the storm was essentially a very realistic, full-scale functional exercise. When the next time comes, and it will, they will be a lot better prepared.