MSU faculty member uses National Science Foundation grant to study hurricanes during potentially record-breaking season

by Sam Kealhofer, Intern on the A&S Research Support Team

Mississippi State University Department of Geosciences Assistant Professor Kimberly Wood garnered a National Sciences Foundation (NSF) grant this summer to investigate hurricanes that come close to or make landfall in the United States, intending to learn more about accurate prediction of rainfall associated with the powerful storms.

The team working with Wood includes Stephanie Zick, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, and Corene Matyas, a professor at the University of Florida. The collaboration will examine hurricanes like Hurricane Isaias, the early August hurricane which passed through the U.S. East Coast, leaving rainfall and damage in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and New York.

Wood will combine her satellite expertise with Zick’s modeling knowledge and Matyas’s skills in radar and geographic methods to explore the structure of tropical storms and hurricanes. Their work aims to relate hurricane structure to the amount of rain hurricane’s produce and how atmospheric moisture affects that rain. For her research, Wood utilizes polar-orbiting satellite data to analyze the “rainbands,” the systems within storms that create rain, providing observations the team compares with ground-based radar via geographic methods to evaluate storm structure.

Wood will use polar-orbiting satellite radar and ground radar to see how accurately satellite radar can capture hurricane rainband structure. The focus will then move beyond radar range, farther from the coast of the U.S., to evaluate numerous storms that move within different moisture environments in order to see how those environments affect the rainbands. For example, tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic often encounter the Saharan air layer, a dry, warm, dusty airmass that comes from Africa, which can keep the storms from intensifying.

The team will collaborate with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the accuracy of current hurricane model forecasts of rainband structure, leading to better hurricane rainfall predictions.

Already in the middle of active hurricane season, the traditional method of naming each storm after one letter in the alphabet might not suffice for the expected number of tropical cyclones this year. Wood said there are already two new disturbances the team is watching in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. The storms’ movement will influence the way the team studies them.

Wood is providing her graduate and undergraduate students an opportunity to assist in the project, gaining hands-on experience in coding, reading scientific papers, analyzing data and the final results.

Wood’s 2020 article, “Factors Affecting the 2019 Atlantic Hurricane Season and the Role of the Indian Ocean Dipole,” published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, highlights seasonal hurricane forecasting and demonstrates that the Indian Ocean Dipole’s effect on the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season resembled El Niño, likely contributing to a decrease in hurricane activity in October 2019. Wood said integrating this knowledge into hurricane predictions will help improve seasonal hurricane forecasts.

For more than a decade Wood has studied tropical cyclone evolution, climatology of cyclones, extratropical transition and tropical variability in the tropics like the Indian Ocean Dipole and El Nino. Her work is featured in professional journals such as Monthly Weather Review, Weather and Forecasting, and Journal of Climate.

In an effort to contribute insight and solutions to the various challenges facing the nation, the College of Arts & Sciences will continue to highlight faculty research in our “Research in the Headlines” series each Monday and Wednesday. For more research in the headlines, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/research/researchintheheadlines/; and for information about the College of Arts & Sciences or the Department of Geosciences visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/ or https://www.geosciences.msstate.edu/.