Hurricane Scientist – African Origins

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ambience: Fiji Hurricane

Radar images of hurricanes barreling through the Gulf of Mexico are a familiar late summer sight, but hurricanes start off much smaller and much farther away than you might realize. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Robbie Hood is an Atmospheric Scientist at Marshall Space Flight Center. She has been studying how hurricanes form and looking across the Atlantic Ocean into Africa.

“How do you start a tropical cyclone? What’s the birth of it? How do you get it started? And that’s one of the things we are studying. We know what the basic ingredients are that you need to have to get a hurricane started. You need a warm ocean, you need a wind structure that will allow the development of thunderstorms, and you need something to get it spinning. You know you need those things, but we still don’t have the right exact recipe for how to guarantee that one will spin up. We want to go out to the Cape Verde islands and take a closer look at thunderstorms that are coming off the coast of Africa, as they move over the Atlantic, how they can turn into hurricanes. And actually go through the genesis process. Something close to 87% of the major hurricanes affecting the United States actually have their origin in Africa. There are Saharan dust storms and then there are large, large dust layers that are blown from Africa that actually reach over here to the United States. And there is also a group of researchers that are investigating ok, does that have an effect on hurricane activity?’ The dust particles, does that increase or decrease hurricane activity? That job’s going to be a little bit harder, because you’ve got the whole Atlantic Ocean to work with. But, we want to study you know, is there a difference when it comes off the coast of Africa. Is there a difference between one thunderstorm from another that might the lead to the genesis of hurricanes downstream?”

We’ll here more about hurricane formation on future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation with additional support from NASA. I’m Jim Metzner.

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Hurricane Scientist - African Origins

To study a hurricane's origin, you need to look far across the ocean.
Air Date:08/02/2006
Scientist:
Transcript:

music
ambience: Fiji Hurricane

Radar images of hurricanes barreling through the Gulf of Mexico are a familiar late summer sight, but hurricanes start off much smaller and much farther away than you might realize. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Robbie Hood is an Atmospheric Scientist at Marshall Space Flight Center. She has been studying how hurricanes form and looking across the Atlantic Ocean into Africa.

“How do you start a tropical cyclone? What’s the birth of it? How do you get it started? And that’s one of the things we are studying. We know what the basic ingredients are that you need to have to get a hurricane started. You need a warm ocean, you need a wind structure that will allow the development of thunderstorms, and you need something to get it spinning. You know you need those things, but we still don’t have the right exact recipe for how to guarantee that one will spin up. We want to go out to the Cape Verde islands and take a closer look at thunderstorms that are coming off the coast of Africa, as they move over the Atlantic, how they can turn into hurricanes. And actually go through the genesis process. Something close to 87% of the major hurricanes affecting the United States actually have their origin in Africa. There are Saharan dust storms and then there are large, large dust layers that are blown from Africa that actually reach over here to the United States. And there is also a group of researchers that are investigating ok, does that have an effect on hurricane activity?’ The dust particles, does that increase or decrease hurricane activity? That job’s going to be a little bit harder, because you’ve got the whole Atlantic Ocean to work with. But, we want to study you know, is there a difference when it comes off the coast of Africa. Is there a difference between one thunderstorm from another that might the lead to the genesis of hurricanes downstream?”

We’ll here more about hurricane formation on future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation with additional support from NASA. I'm Jim Metzner.

music