NASA fellowships in hand, students focus on hurricane research

“I always wanted to be a meteorologist,” says Joseph Zagrodnik. A master’s student in FIU’s Department of Earth & Environment, the only thing the Wisconsin native was unsure of was which specialty within the field he would study.

That decision, he says, became an easy one when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in 2007 and took part in Katrina Corp, a spring break trip sponsored by the University of Wisconsin.

Two years after one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history raked across the region, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing: complete devastation and a community still struggling to get back on its feet.

“I knew then that I wanted to focus my studies on learning about the processes that led to Katrina happening,” he says.

Katrina, of course, is hurricane Katrina, the killer storm that came ashore Aug. 29, 2005. With sustained winds during landfall of 125 miles per hour (a strong Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale), it remains one of the strongest storms to impact the U.S. coast in the last 100 years. At least 1,836 people died in the storm and its tragic aftermath.

Four years after that fateful spring break trip, Zagrodnik is searching for new ways to more accurately predict rainfall distribution in hurricanes as a 2011 NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow. The competitive award brings with it the potential for $90,000 in support ($30,000 annually for up to three years) and the acknowledgement that, as Zagrodnik puts it, “My work is worthy of NASA’s support.”

He’s not alone

Doctoral candidate Cheng “Emmy” Tao was also named a 2011 NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow. Her research focuses on “hot towers” in tropical cyclones. (Intense storms, tropical cyclones in the Atlantic are known as hurricanes and in the western Pacific as typhoons.)

Cheng grew up in Shenzhen, China, in Guangdong province, near Hong Kong. She said her hometown experiences typhoons every year, which piqued her interest in the storms. Today she is analyzing 12 years of data in the hopes of devising a statistical method that can identify what effect, if any, these hot towers have on the intensity changes of hurricanes.

Hot towers are tropical cumulonimbus clouds – tall, dense rain clouds that stretch upward for miles and miles, at least to the lowest layer of the stratosphere. They are called “hot” and rise to such an altitude because of the very strong updraft in them. Scientists hypothesize that hot towers play a role in the rapid intensification of hurricanes due to the large amount of latent heat release in them.

Enabling improved forecasting

“Emmy and Joe have picked really important areas of research to work on,” says Haiyan Jiang, assistant professor in FIU’s Department of Earth & Environment and a mentor to both students. “It has been a big challenge for forecasters to improve the rainfall and intensity change forecasts for tropical cyclones. Their research is going to provide valuable information in that regard.”

More accurate forecasting is of critical importance to residents in the potential path of the storm. One need only think back to last summer and hurricane Irene to be reminded of the stakes.

Forecast to hit North Carolina as a major hurricane before tracking toward New York City as a Category 1 hurricane, the storm actually made landfall as a Category 1 storm and was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it reached New York City. Flooding was not as severe as they had predicted in some places, and worse in others. Vermont, for instance, experienced its worst flooding in decades.

Says Joe, “We think of a hurricane as a circular disk that’s moving, but the rainfall is distributed differently in each section of the storm. We can observe that from space and then use that data to improve predictions of the rainfall over land so that the right areas can be evacuated and warned.”

In select company

The highly competitive NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowships are available in Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science and astrophysics. In 2011, only 57 proposals were selected for funding from a pool of 331 applications in the Earth science cateogory. Zagrodnik and Cheng were the only students from Florida’s State University System honored this year in this category. Criteria for evaluation included the scientific merit of the proposed research, the relevance of the research to NASA’s objectives in Earth or space science, and academic excellence.

“Ensuring the continued development of a competent workforce for the exploration of space is one of the major goals of NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program,” says Ming-Ying Wei of NASA Headquarters. “Improving our understanding and prediction of hurricane and typhoon processes is one of the high-priority research objectives in Earth science at NASA.”

With a suite of Earth-observing satellites NASA has in space pertaining to processes relevant to hurricane and typhoon development, Wei says that Zagrodnik and Tao will learn to use remote sensing data to conduct their thesis research, and their research will further inform our scientific understanding and predictive capacity.

Location, location, location

“NOAA’s National Hurricane Center is literally right here at FIU,” points out Zagrodnik. “Between that, the expertise of our faculty, and FIU’s location, it just made sense to do my graduate work here.” His undergraduate degree in atmospheric science is from the University of Wisconsin.

Tao received her bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. She says FIU offers something few Chinese universities can: an opportunity to pursue hurricane-related research.

Says Jiang, their mentor, “NASA wants to train the next generation of scientists capable of working for them. By the time Joe and Emmy graduate, they are going to be young stars shining brightly in our field.”