For UW hurricane researchers, Hurricane Milton is a learning opportunity

More than 1,000 miles from where Hurricane Milton made landfall on Wednesday night, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are using data from the storm to refine the way they study hurricanes.

Researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies analyze satellite data in order to provide accurate storm tracking information to forecasters at agencies such as the National Hurricane Center.

“We take satellite data, we manipulate it into something the forecasters can use outside of just pretty pictures,” associate researcher Sarah Griffin said.

It’s work that began in Wisconsin in the 1950s, when UW-Madison scientists created the first weather satellite.

Currently, CIMSS researchers are developing new methods to estimate the intensity of a tropical cyclone from satellite imagery. That’s especially helpful for storms over the open ocean, where aircraft reconnaissance is not available.

Griffin is working on artificial intelligence models to analyze that data more efficiently than humans can. For those models, Milton offers a valuable learning experience.

“The thing with Milton is, Milton was very small and had the tiny, tiny eye, and so we really struggled with – if you don’t have the exact location, you’re going to be messed up. And so, now that we know, we’re going to go back to the drawing board,” Griffin said. “We’ve got some ideas on how to fix it, and we want to actually rerun this with those ideas and just see what the results are.”

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