With the warming world, changing climatic patterns and unpredictable forecasts of weather, NASA seems to have come to the rescue. They have discovered means to forecast a storm’s intensity by monitoring the lightning strikes near a hurricane’s eye. The best part of this is that it can be done weeks before the storm arrives with the help of ‘highly-sensitive sensors’ that too located thousands of miles from the storm.
Researchers can now investigate with greater accuracy how the rate of lightning strikes produced within a hurricane’s eyewall is tied to the changing strength of that hurricane. A hurricane’s eyewall is the inner heat-driven region of the storm that surrounds the ‘eye’ where the most intense rainfall and most powerful winds occur.
By monitoring the intensity of lightning near a hurricane’s eye, scientists will be able to improve their forecasts of when a storm will unleash its harshest conditions. There are very few observing systems that offer a broad view of a storm over the open ocean where hurricanes tend to build or lose strength.
In NASA own words:
When water condenses from vapor into a cloud droplet, latent or hidden heat is released, which in turn builds updrafts — air moving upwards in a cloud. Latent heat provides the energy that fuels hurricanes. If the ensuing updrafts are strong enough, they can cause the separation of charge that produces lightning. The tight correlation between the rate of lightning strikes, the amount of rainfall and the heat released in the eyewall of a storm allows the lightning rate data to be useful in computer models that forecast hurricane track and intensity.
Hurricanes are one of the most powerful storms on Earth, frequent and intense hurricanes, storms have become a recurrence these days, any information that can provide insight into saving future lives is most welcome. The unprecedented back-to-back blow of two Category 5 hurricanes, Hurricane Felix and Hurricane Dean, left many dead and numerous lives torn apart. We can only hope that this research is truly helpful in when future hurricanes strike.
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