As many Aggies headed home to avoid Hurricane Ike when Texas A&M closed on September 12, seven meteorology undergraduates and two Ph.D. students baked brownies, made sandwiches, loaded up coolers with bottled water, and headed for the 12th floor of the Eller Oceanography & Meteorology Building instead.
(Media-Newswire.com) - As many Aggies headed home to avoid Hurricane Ike when Texas A&M closed on September 12, seven meteorology undergraduates and two Ph.D. students baked brownies, made sandwiches, loaded up coolers with bottled water, and headed for the 12th floor of the Eller Oceanography & Meteorology Building instead.
This group of students spent over 20 hours in the Atmospheric Sciences Department’s newly remodeled radar lab monitoring the storm and capturing radar images as it made landfall in Galveston and moved north through Aggieland.
From 6:42 p.m. Friday until 3:36 p.m. Saturday, the students ran the department’s Aggie Doppler Radar ( ADRAD ) located on the building’s roof, only shutting down from 7 to 11 a.m. Saturday morning as the eye of the storm passed to the east of Brazos County. Sustained winds on the rooftop approached 50 miles per hour with gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour for much of this time, raising concern about the possibility of damage to the radar antenna.
Texas A&M’s Atmospheric Sciences Department is one of the few meteorology programs in the country with a 10-cm Doppler weather radar dedicated solely for student use. ADRAD last captured a hurricane comparable to category-2 Ike’s strength in 1983 when Hurricane Alicia, a category-3 storm, hit the Brazos Valley. Students seized this opportunity to study a rare and powerful force of nature.
In addition to taking their own readings, the students stayed in contact with the control tower at Easterwood Airport, as often as every 15 minutes during the worst of the storm, confirming wind speeds and direction. They also monitored National Weather Service updates online, and streamed video from ABC 13 KTRK news in Houston.
The graduate assistants in charge, Larry Hopper and Justin Stachnik, agree that tracking the storm was a valuable educational experience for the students, and that future students will benefit greatly from studying the data that was collected.
“It was a 20-hour non-stop effort that proved to be an incredible hands-on learning experience,” said Stachnik. “We started tracking Ike earlier in the week when it looked like it might make landfall near Galveston and had to check each new forecast to see if it would be possible to run ADRAD during the storm.”
“I knew going into it that this storm was becoming more organized prior to landfall,” Hopper added, “and that there was a chance we would have to stop the radar at some point. But we figured we could at least sample the eye, which as it turned out, was very well-defined.”
“We really were in a unique position and were able to capture excellent radar data as it passed through our area,” Stachnik said. “The nearest National Weather Service radars are located in League City and Granger, Texas.”
All of the students who tracked Hurricane Ike are participants in SOAP, the Student Operational ADRAD Project. Funded by the National Science Foundation through a CAREER Grant award to Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Courtney Schumacher, the goal of SOAP is to better understand how storms interact with the larger scale circulation in Southeast Texas.
The SOAP program operates ADRAD regularly in the spring and on a volunteer basis during other seasons to collect a climatology of storms. SOAP, which is funded through 2010, has 30 undergraduate meteorology student participants each spring semester, as well as a smaller group that performs independent research projects each fall semester.
“The students who tracked the storm have significant experience running the radar,” Hopper said. “That was important to us because we wanted to be comfortable with their basic knowledge so we could train them to look for the mechanical failures that could have been caused by this severe weather event.”
According to Stachnik and Hopper, at least one student manned the radar the entire time it was running to monitor the radar’s antenna. Another student watched the radar and also took cross sections of the data in real time to keep an eye on the storm’s structure, while others checked incoming numerical weather model guidance to provide storm track and intensity forecasts as Ike approached the local region. Students were also monitoring wind speeds and posting them hourly. Hopper stayed in contact with the control tower at Easterwood Airport to get wind speed, direction and surface pressure reports.
“We had the students doing forecasting initially on Friday evening trying to predict what was going to happen and whether we should even stay,” Hopper said. “Then we switched to nowcasting to determine the intensity of the system at any given time. We weren’t just checking wind speeds, but were also monitoring surface pressures and radar images to determine if the storm was intensifying or weakening with time in our area.”
Assistant professor Courtney Schumacher was happy with the students' effort and the resultant dataset. “I was impressed with the skill and enthusiasm that the group exhibited in capturing the storm. I have already used the data they collected in my radar meteorology class, and I look forward to having my research group analyze the observations in the context of other storms that we experience in Southeast Texas.”
Meteorology students Michelle Cohen, Collin Lawrence, and Matt Raper monitored Ike Friday evening. The Aggies who spent the night tracking Ike were Sandra Diaz, Amanda Fanning, Brian Haines, and Brad Reinhart. Jennifer Stein was expecting to come in as back-up to keep the radar running through Saturday night, but the decision was made to shut down early due to power outages that were becoming more widespread throughout the area on Saturday afternoon.
Atmospheric Sciences Department Head Kenneth Bowman said that the students did a great job operating the Aggie Doppler Radar and observing Hurricane Ike. “I am always glad to see this kind of initiative and dedication from our students,” Bowman added.
Related Content
Release Date
This story was released on 2008-09-24. Please make sure to visit the official company or organization web site to learn more about the original release date. See our disclaimer for additional information.