Intern Shane Hinton – senior Meteorology major with minors in Mathematics and Electronic Media working under Dr. Shuyi Chen at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School.

Entry 2:

July has just started but I am already submerged in my research with hurricane forecast models. Since my last entry, I have become even more familiar with the MATLAB software and have plotted many different models depicting rainfall swath (or distance covered by rainfall) for hurricanes. This allows me to visualize how much rainfall was predicted to occur for a single forecasting model.

In addition to rainfall swath plots, I have begun to plot images of various energy fluxes in the atmosphere. These various energy fluxes include changes in the atmosphere along with certain types of heat exchange. Hopefully, I will be able to interpret these plots so that I may grasp a better understanding for why most models over predicted rainfall intensity and why a few under predicted.

I have 19 ensembles (or forecasting models) that I am analyzing and each of them predicted different amounts of rainfall and energy fluxes. While this can sometimes be rather intimidating, I know that each and every one of these ensembles will be crucial to me achieving my goal of detecting forecast model inaccuracy!

As of now, it appears that models pertaining to flux physics are tending to over predict rainfall intensity the most in hurricane models. Some of these models over predicted the rainfall amounts by over 600 mm in a day! Over the course of the next few weeks, I hope to take a deeper look into why this is occurring. Once I finish my analysis, I will compose everything into an organized report and share it with all of you!