Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Associated Press reporter Terry Spencer about Tampa Bay’s vulnerability to incoming hurricanes. “It’s a huge population,” explains Emanuel. “It’s very exposed, very inexperienced and that’s a losing proposition. I always thought Tampa would be the city to worry about most.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Washington Post reporters Sarah Kaplan, Shannon Osaka and Dan Stillman about the future of hurricane forecasting. “This is one thing that scares me, if these things can intensify more rapidly,” says Emanuel. “We’re going to have cases where forecasters go to bed with a tropical storm and wake up with a Category 5 when it’s too late to evacuate people.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with New York Times reporter Christopher Kuo about the expectations for the upcoming hurricane season. When discussing Hurricane Beryl, Emanuel says “usually the June and July storms are relatively benign. They don’t get up to full strength, so it’s very rare to have this.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Scientific American reporter Chelsea Harvey about the future of hurricane forecasting and preparations. “I can’t predict the future, but I’m optimistic that things will get better,” says Emanuel. “And you’ll see people moving away from risky places, which is already beginning to happen. And those who elect to stay [will be] paying a lot of insurance or retrofitting houses to be built stronger.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein about this year’s Atlantic hurricane season. “This year, there’s also a significant difference between water temperature and upper air temperature throughout the tropics,” writes Borenstein. “The Atlantic relative to the rest of the tropics is as warm as I’ve seen,” says Emanuel.
Science reporter Paul Voosen spotlights Tropics “a four-CubeSat mission launched by NASA last year” and led by Lincoln Laboratory Fellow William (Bill) Blackwell. The mission has “yielded unprecedented observations of the evolution of hurricanes cores,” writes Voosen.
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Living on Earth host Jenni Doering about the future of extreme weather forecasting. “We have to do a much better job projecting long term risk, and how that's changing as the climate changes so that people can make intelligent decisions about where they're going to live, what they're going to build, and so on,” says Emanuel. “We need better models, we need better computers, so that we can resolve the atmosphere better, we need to make better measurements of the ocean below the surface, that's really tough to do.”
Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks with The Hill reporter Zack Budryk about how Hurricane Idalia will impact rural Florida. “The thing that makes [Idalia] a little bit unusual is that it hit a part of the Florida coastline which has experienced very few hurricane-level landfalls in the last hundred years,” says Emanuel.
Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks with Jeff Martin at the Associated Press about the potential influence of the supermoon on Hurricane Idalia. “When the moon is full, the sun and the moon are pulling in the same direction, which has the effect of increasing tides above normal ranges” says Emanuel.
Researchers from Lincoln Laboratory and NASA are working on the TROPICS mission to study tropical cyclones, reports Bella Isaacs-Thomas for the PBS NewsHour. “Technology today — finally — allows us to miniaturize these satellites, fly a lot of them and get that temporal update that we’ve been wanting for so long,” explains Laboratory Fellow William Blackwell.
Researchers from Lincoln Lab and NASA are working on the TROPICS research mission, an effort to collect meteorological data on tropical storms from mini satellites, reports Daniel Cusick for Scientific American. "Scientists will observe temperature profiles in space that would be favorable to storm formation at the Earth’s surface, then use a weather prediction model and radiometric imagery to better predict how such storms would behave," Cusick writes.
Prof. Kerry Emanuel and First Street Foundation have found that based on warming climate conditions and patterns, future storms will increase in intensity and travel farther north up the East Coast, reports Leslie Kaufman and Eric Roston for Bloomberg.
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with CNN reporters Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon about future hurricane trends. “The bottom line is the models that are being used by the existing [catastrophe] modeling industry are based strictly on historical statistics,” says Emanuel. “The historical record isn’t very long, and it isn’t very good when you get back to before 1970.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel discusses the impact climate change has on hurricanes, reports Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic. “First of all, you can have more intense hurricanes in a warmer climate. That finding goes back well over 30 years now,” says Emanuel. “For that reason we expect to see more of the highest-category storms—the Cat 3s, Cat 4s, Cat 5s, more of the Ian-style storms.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Newsweek reporter Pandora Dewan about Hurricane Ian and its correlation to climate change, reports Pandora Dewan for Newsweek. “What worries people in my profession is the confluence of two trends," says Emanuel. "One is demographic, one is nature. The number of people exposed to hurricanes has tripled since 1970 [as] people are moving in droves to hurricane-prone regions. Then the climate is changing, and that is demonstrably increasing the incidence of high-end storms like Ian."