SLIDELL, La. (WGNO) – On the Gulf Coast during a hurricane, storm surge is public enemy number one.
Meteorologist-in-Charge Ken Graham at the National Weather Service in New Orleans has been tracking hurricanes for more than 20 years. He says the 2015 technology is a game changer for forecasters.
“I think we’re gonna be able to communicate the risk better than ever. The risk of tornadoes, the risk of flooding, the risk of rain and also the risk of storm surge,” says Graham.
Forecasters hope to do that by using the two new science-based weather tools: the inundation map and the p-surge, or probabilistic surge, warning map.
Graham says the old way was, and still is, a good way of predicting the surge but the new system is more accurate.
It comes into play when tropical force winds are within 48 hours.
“So when we have a watch or a warning, we’re actually gonna shrink the tracks and run a model to look at fewer tracks, and we’re gonna have an inundation map for the first time. This inundation map is really unique because, in our history, we’ve never had so much social science go into a product since 1870 here in New Orleans.”
The inundation map shows the amount of water predicted to surge into an area, providing what graham calls “up your pant leg water amounts” with 90 percent probability of those amounts or less—in other words, a “reasonable worst case scenario.”
The bottom line is that fewer people will be unnecessarily warned, and those who are warned will have more accurate information.
This year marks 10 years, 50 years and 100 years since major hurricanes struck New Orleans.
While Graham is passionate about this new technology, he doesn’t want to be in a position to have to use it.
