Why was Hurricane Lane so unpredictable?
August 25, 2018 by Kayla Zacharias
Hawaii's Big Island is experiencing severe flooding as of Friday morning, leaving many surprised or unprepared, as the path of Hurricane Lane was looking unpredictable earlier in the week. Why can these storms be so hard to predict?
Models that forecast the path of a storm are fairly accurate, but they're not as good at predicting changes in intensity, said Dan Chavas, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University.
"As Lane approaches Hawaii it will encounter a significant increase in wind shear – changes in wind speed and direction in the lowest 10 kilometers of the atmosphere – which we expect will cause the storm to weaken," Chavas said. "But since our models perform less well in predicting changes in intensity, people should be cautious."
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-hurricane-lane-unpredictable.html#jCp
