How Satellites and Big Data Are Predicting the Behavior of Hurricanes and Other Natural Disasters

On Friday afternoons, Caitlin Kontgis and some of the other scientists at Descartes Labs convene in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, office and get down to work on a grassroots project that's not part of their jobs: watching hurricanes from above, and seeing if they can figure out what the storms will do.* They acquire data from GOES, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite operated by NOAA and NASA, which records images of the Western Hemisphere every five minutes. That's about how long it takes the team to process each image through a deep learning algorithm that detects the eye of a hurricane and centers the image processor over that. Then, they incorporate synthetic aperture data, which uses long-wave radar to see through clouds, and can discern water beneath based on reflectivity. That, in turn, can show almost real-time flooding, tracked over days, of cities in the path of hurricanes.