Colorado State University

The most intense tropical cyclones are characterized by maximum 1-minute mean surface (10-meter) wind speeds of 70-90 ms-1. Dropsondes within the boundary layer occasionally sample gusts (representative of timescales of a few seconds) exceeding 90 ms-1 and (more rarely) 100 ms-1. Such extreme wind gusts are found in nearly every category-5 tropical cyclone, but because of irregular and sparse sampling, it is unclear how frequent these gusts are, or whether… Read more »

NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) are a mainstay of weather forecasts and environmental monitoring in the United States. The next generation of GOES satellites, known as the GOES-R Series, represents significant advancements in the near real-time observation of severe weather across the Western Hemisphere. The GOES-R satellite, the first in the series that also includes GOES-S, GOES-T and GOES-U, launched on November 19, 2016. GOES-R became GOES-16 when it… Read more »

Knowledge of weather patterns a day, three days, or even three weeks from now requires forecasts based on models initialized with accurate data. Vertically resolved wind profile data has been shown to have a high impact on forecast accuracy but measurements remain sparse, especially over areas such as the oceans or the Southern Hemisphere. This lack of wind profile data is a major limiting factor in numerical weather prediction’s ability… Read more »

The first global measurements of the Earth’s emitted thermal energy and the amount of solar energy it absorbs from the Sun were made from early satellites in the 1960s to the 1980s. They provided a much different Radiation Budget than had been thought in the pre-satellite era. Following the scientific method, two additional satellite missions were used to confirm the first measurements by Vonder Haar and Suomi (1969, 1971). The… Read more »

The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season was an extremely active one, with 17 named storms (1981-2010 median is 12.0), 10 hurricanes (median is 6.5), 6 major hurricanes (median is 2.0) and 245% of the 1981-2010 median Accumulated Cyclone Energy occurring. The combination of a hurricane-enhancing large-scale environment and a stronger western Atlantic subtropical high led to one of the most damaging Atlantic hurricane seasons on record. Record-breaking levels of activity… Read more »