Data improve hurricane forecasts, but uncertainties remain

WASHINGTON – With modern technology, people can watch hurricanes churn in real time and forecasts are on-target up to seven days in advance -- but experts say some puzzling storm traits are harder to solve. Using hurricane hunter aircraft, converted military drones, weather balloons and satellites that examine cyclones under various angles, "our observations are really telling us what is happening now," said Frank Marks, director of the Hurricane Research Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "And also those observations are phenomenally useful to improving our ability to predict," he told AFP. All the collected data are immediately transmitted to meteorologists and entered into computer models that produce forecasts at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. Marks describes forecasts as simply "what we think might happen," saying experts' ability to make them has "improved dramatically for the last 35 years." When he began his career in 1980, forecasts could look ahead about two days.