Abstract
After more than a decade of primary research and previous decades of proprietary consultant research, two conclusions have become clear: Weather is the primary reason people choose local television news, and weathercasters play prominent roles in their communities.
This combination is especially true during major weather events. In 2011, the most costly year in weather disasters since the government started keeping records in 1980, Mother Nature put on a show, keeping weathercasters working overtime in high-stress situations from coast to coast. Whether because of record snow and cold in the Midwest and Northeast in winter, historic spring tornadoes across the plains and Southeast, or devastating drought and wildfires in Texas from summer to fall, local weathercasters were on the front lines in the quest for necessary information during crises.
Hurricane Irene was just one example. Irene formed as a tropical storm on August 20 just east of the Lesser Antilles, became a hurricane over Puerto Rico and achieved Category 3 status on August 24 before hitting the Bahamas. Original predicted paths included large swaths of the east coast, including Florida.
“Any time a storm forms anywhere in the Atlantic, Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico we go into alert mode,” says John Morales, chief meteorologist for NBC Miami. “The graphic ‘Trouble in the Tropics’ goes up immediately and if South Florida is included anywhere in the cone of uncertainty we lead the newscast with three or more minutes off the top. If it comes in our direction, then we go wall-to-wall.”
Irene missed Florida and saved its biggest impacts for parts of the country not used to tropical rains and winds. On August 27, Irene made landfall at Cape Lookout, North Carolina. Then the eye worked its way up the Atlantic seaboard before making a historic second landfall along the Jersey shore and then barreling over New York City. There were also torrential rains in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and, finally, New England.
“There’s not been a landfalling hurricane over New York City since September 1821,” NBC New York chief meteorologist Janice Huff said in an e-mail. “We began preparing early in the week at the first signs that the track would bring the storm within 100 miles of our coastline.”
The impacts may have shocked many people in regions with no recent memory of previous storms, but it did not surprise forecasters.
“Almost every landfalling hurricane to hit New England has had catastrophic consequences,” says Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center.
Read says it can be a challenge to get people to pay attention to forecasts and their primary goal is to prevent loss of life. “We can get people out of the way in time with reliable forecasts, and local TV is integral in that role, but there’s no way to get property out of harm’s way,” he adds.
The primary loss of life from hurricanes comes not from wind, but water, specifically storm surge. That’s especially true now that 50% of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of the coasts and many of those places are near sea level. Using numeric models called SLOSH (Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes), storm surge specialist Jamie Rhome says 15,000 simulations, such as the size of the storm’s wind field, angle of approach, and tides decide what areas need to be evacuated up to 2 days in advance of predicted landfall, can be examined.
“We have a zero tolerance for loss of life,” says Rhomb, who adds, “the only way to ensure safety is to evacuate for the worst case scenario.”
The worst case scenario with Hurricane Irene included unprecedented evacuations of low lying areas around New York City. Nearly a half million people were evacuated, and the nation’s largest mass transit system was shut down in advance of the Sunday morning direct hit to the city.
After the storm passed, many New Yorkers and media critics complained that Irene was over hyped; however, it caused six million people to lose power, cut off entire villages in Vermont after a foot of rain and caused widespread flooding across one-dozen states.
“There was no loss of life, even though there was significant storm surge from the Carolina’s all the way to Maine,” says Rhome. “While there is no perfect evacuation, local weathercasters and emergency managers did as good a job as they could.”
“While Lower Manhattan did not experience the flooding that could have been, those areas needed to be evacuated since it was difficult to know exactly what to expect,” says Huff.
To the charge that Irene was over hyped Huff reminds everyone that “tens of thousands [were] forced out of their homes due to massive rainfall and record flooding.”
Chris Landsea is a science and operations officer with the National Hurricane Center. He says the track forecast for Irene was “excellent,” giving ample warning days in advance. Landsea, whose three children are named for previous hurricanes, says the track forecast blends six computer models to create consensus guidance and to reduce any false alarms.
“Hurricane track forecasts have improved significantly,” says hurricane researcher Dr. Robert Rogers. “Track errors have been cut in half.”
As part of the NOAA Hurricane Improvement Project, Rogers expects to also extend the forecast reliability out to 7 days from the current 5 days.
“That’s the good news,” says Rogers. “The bad news is that intensity forecasts have not improved at all over the last few decades.”
That was the case for Irene, whose journey followed the predicted path from the Bahamas to New York City, but whose wind intensity forecast was on the “high side,” according to Landsea.
A variety of factors affect hurricane intensity, including ocean temperature. “We also need to understand ocean temperature and thickness of warming to improve intensity forecasts,” says ocean modeler Dr. George Halliwell.
All oceans interact and influence each other, so much so that there is an inverse relationship among the relatively stable number of 90 annual tropical storms around the globe. “When we see a spike in North Atlantic storms, there is a decrease in other ocean basins,” says physical oceanographer Dr. Chunzai Wang.
After a record 2005 season with 28 named storms, relative quiet now exists in the Atlantic. Wang attributes that to other factors that can influence hurricane intensity including wind shear and a dominant ocean atmosphere circulation that steers storms off the east coast of the United States.
One of the ways meteorologists tackle the intensity issue is to fly directly into a storm. Using two large P-3 aircraft, researchers such as Shirley Murillo crisscross the four quadrants of a storm at 10–12,000 feet above the sea surface.
“We release up to 30 dropsondes from the belly of the aircraft to gather all kinds of data on relative humidity and wind speed and direction,” Murillo says. “It’s like a catscan of a hurricane.”
And like health care, getting this information can be expensive, especially during austere budget times, with each dropsonde costing $700 and the 8–10 hr plane trip costing $2,500 an hour. However, those costs pale in comparison to the damage costs from a storm and the estimated $1-million a mile for each evacuation.
Ultimately, this research and information makes its way to the most public face for storm warnings: television weathercasters. They are the trusted, recognizable faces who prepare and educate large, eager audiences seeking guidance.
In a survey of three markets in Irene’s path, Hearst Television found more than half of the people living in Baltimore, Boston, and Burlington, VT, turned to local television as their primary source of information about the storm (compared to 11% for the Internet and 10% for The Weather Channel) and more than 90% in all three markets were “very/somewhat satisfied” with the coverage.
There’s a lot of pressure on the approximately 1,300 local TV weathercasters in the United States. They need to remain personable and reassuring during a crisis and provide scientifically sound information in a conversational way.
“We learned to be as calm, yet informative as possible,” says Huff. “We wanted to make sure the public was not so focused on the eye alone, but the entire storm and to heed warnings. We learned that being prepared as early as possible saves lives and that no two hurricanes are alike.”