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The Eye of Maria

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Mike Caprio edited this page Mar 23, 2018 · 27 revisions

Create Animations and Interactive Tools to Understand the Motion of Sailing Objects in the Vicinity of a Hurricane

Background

There is no meteorological event that exposes the power of nature to unleash more devastation than a hurricane. This has been evident this year as hurricane Maria have battered, from east to west, Dominica, Guadeloupe, the United States Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. A question that has not received particular attention in the aftermath of Maria is what is the damage of the hurricane as it crosses the ocean? For example, what is the fate of sailing, drifting and floating objects that came across the track of Hurricane Maria?

Animation of NOAA's GOES satellite imagery showing Hurricane Maria. Video credit to NASA.

It is scientifically and computationally challenging to generate understanding of the potential effects of Hurricanes on land. These endeavors are even more challenging because of the scarcity of observations in the ocean. Nevertheless, considerable opportunities for making progress is provided by advances in computational visualization techniques (participant's expertise) together with an explosion in ocean observational data available from drifters and floats. We will use two datasets:

  1. Data collected by ocean drifters during the period 2017/08/27-2017/10/16 - 20 days before, during, and 20 days after Hurricane Maria - for the region 10-37N and 50-90W. Ocean drifters are the high-tech version of the "message in a bottle". They consist of a surface buoy and a subsurface drogue (anchor), attached by a long, thin tether. The buoy measures sea surface temperature and location (longitude and latitude) data of the drifter, and has a transmitter to send the data to passing satellites.

Surface and subsea deployment of a drifter. Video credit to Dr. Buston and Dr. Lindo-Atichati.

  1. Data collected by ocean floats during the period 2017/08/27-2017/10/16 - 20 days before, during, and 20 days after Hurricane Maria - for the region 10-37N and 50-90W. Ocean floats are, counter intuitively, devices that sink. They are free-drifting profiling devices that measure the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean, and also record their positions. They spend most of their life drifting at depth where they are stabilised by being neutrally buoyant at the "parking depth". At typically 10-day intervals, the floats pump fluid into an external bladder and rise to the surface over about 6 hours while measuring temperature and salinity. Satellites or GPS determine the position of the floats when they surface, and the floats transmit their data to passing satellites

Surface and subsea deployment of an Argo float. Video credit to Dr. Lindo-Atichati, NOAA/AOML, and the Argo Project.

The rapid mobilization of scientific and computing capacity will enable this untested but potentially transformative work on the motion of sailing objects in the vicinity of hurricanes. It is expected that the computing skills of participants will significantly contribute to advance this exploratory work.

Solutions

Hurricane simulators. For example:

  1. Recreate dispersion of real sailing objects during Hurricane Maria
  2. Simulate dispersion of thousands of virtual sailing objects on the track of a hurricane. That would enable different hurricane categories and hurricane tracks.

Anything you can think of!

Resources

For Solution 1.

  • Drifters' geospatial data collected in the region during Maria: Dr Lindo-Atichati will share a Dropbox link on Slack
  • Floats' geospatial data collected in the region during Maria: Dr Lindo-Atichati will share a Dropbox link on Slack

For Solution 2.

Challenge owner: David Lindo

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