{"id":9914,"date":"2017-10-16T11:45:05","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T19:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/16\/news-3687\/"},"modified":"2017-10-16T11:45:05","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T19:45:05","slug":"news-3687","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/16\/news-3687\/","title":{"rendered":"Even Meteorologists Think Hurricane Ophelia Is Really Weird"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/video-images.vice.com\/articles\/59e4fd9c53390e015dbad920\/lede\/1508179357505-Screen-Shot-2017-10-16-at-22833-PM.png\"\/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Credit to Author: Caroline Haskins| Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2017 19:25:47 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2017\/10\/16\/weather\/ophelia-ireland-arrival\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Post-tropical storm<\/a> Ophelia is currently ravaging Ireland, and has already <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/uk-41627442\" target=\"_blank\">killed three<\/a> people. Ophelia isn&#8217;t just unusual for this year, it&#8217;s unusual for this century. It&#8217;s been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/news\/ireland\/irish-news\/hurricane-debbie-high-winds-death-and-destruction-in-1961-1.3256985\" target=\"_blank\">more than 50 years<\/a> since a storm of Ophelia&#8217;s magnitude has hit Ireland with Hurricane Debbie, in 1961. <\/p>\n<p>Whenever storms are as powerful and unusual as Ophelia, hurricane forecasts are crucially important.<\/p>\n<p>The US government&#8217;s National Hurricane Center&#8217;s (NHC) &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/NHC_Atlantic\" target=\"_blank\">Atlantic Ops<\/a>&#8221; tweeted a forecast image of Ophelia, showing the chances for various wind speeds over a five-day period. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhc.noaa.gov\/refresh\/graphics_at2+shtml\/025835.shtml?cone\" target=\"_blank\">The most recent forecasts<\/a> say wind speeds could top at 110 miles per hour.<\/p>\n<p>But on Sunday at 5AM, the NHC forecast jarringly severed at 60\u00b0North and 0\u00b0 longitude. This made it unclear what Ophelia does after it passes England and approaches Norway.<\/p>\n<div style=\"max-width: 550px;\" data-iframely-id=\"7HLRzEO\" class=\"article__embed article__embed--iframely\">\n<div style=\"left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;\" data-iframely-smart-iframe=\"true\"><iframe  src= width=\"100%\" height=\"420\" frameborder=\"0\" ><\/iframe> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>While a tweet six hours later provided an expanded update of the forecast, this cutoff occurred because the NHC says it doesn&#8217;t normally see storms that far north in the Atlantic. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Ophelia was an extremely unusual tropical cyclone in terms of how far east and north it was, and so the [forecast] was being cut off,&#8221; Mark DeMaria, the acting deputy director of the NHC, told me in an email. &#8220;Once we noticed the problem, we made a change that allowed the [forecast] to extend further eastward and northward.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div style=\"max-width: 550px;\" data-iframely-id=\"JUkJr6I\" class=\"article__embed article__embed--iframely\">\n<div style=\"left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;\" data-iframely-smart-iframe=\"true\"><iframe  src= width=\"100%\" height=\"420\" frameborder=\"0\" ><\/iframe> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Ireland&#8217;s national meteorological service, Met \u00c9ireann, has been providing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.met.ie\/?InvalidNewsID\" target=\"_blank\">regular Ophelia forecasts<\/a>, but the organization sometimes <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MetEireann\/status\/919493093489106944\" target=\"_blank\">relies on data<\/a> from the NHC to distribute to its audience. <\/p>\n<p>Michael Brennan, a senior hurricane specialist at the NHC, told me in an email that forecasts are created in two steps: First, a NHC computer system creates a basic forecast. Then a National Weather Service (NWS) supercomputer uses more data to create a final forecast.<\/p>\n<p>However, the NWS supercomputer used decade-old hurricane trend predictions, which didn&#8217;t assume a hurricane in 2017 would brew as far northeast as Ophelia.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The cutoff in the first tweet is due to the boundaries of the [supercomputer] grid,&#8221; Brennan said. &#8220;Given Ophelia&#8217;s unusual location, the graphics that use the [supercomputer] weren&#8217;t able to show probabilities along the entire track.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>While the NHC&#8217;s hurricane forecasts haven&#8217;t been structured with storms like Ophelia in mind, this isn&#8217;t necessarily concerning. The NHC primarily focuses on hurricanes that could threaten the United States, but it&#8217;s still worth mentioning the overall rarity of a storm like Ophelia.<\/p>\n<p>Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology of Weather Underground, said that none of this means that the Ophelia forecasts were inaccurate\u2014creating them was just challenging.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The computer models will make reliable forecasts regardless of where a storm is located,&#8221; Masters said. &#8220;The forecasts made over the past twenty-four hours have been more difficult than usual, due to the fact that the storm was in a region where we had few observations.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><b> <i> Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day <\/i><\/b><a href=\"http:\/\/motherboard.club\/\" target=\"_blank\"><b> <i> by signing up for our newsletter<\/i><\/b><\/a><b> <i> .<\/i><\/b> <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/a3k5db\/even-meteorologists-think-hurricane-ophelia-is-really-weird\" target=\"bwo\" >https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/video-images.vice.com\/articles\/59e4fd9c53390e015dbad920\/lede\/1508179357505-Screen-Shot-2017-10-16-at-22833-PM.png\"\/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Credit to Author: Caroline Haskins| Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2017 19:25:47 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Some Sunday forecasts for ex-hurricane Ophelia, which is now striking Ireland, didn&#8217;t show its full path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10643,13328,10378],"tags":[14586,5792,15823,14550,15825,14543,15824,15822,2634,454],"class_list":["post-9914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-motherboard","category-security","tag-hurricane","tag-ireland","tag-meteorology","tag-national-hurricane-center","tag-nhc","tag-noaa","tag-supercomputer","tag-superstorm","tag-tropical-storm","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}