Pitch
With forecast models now predicting Tropical Storm Harvey to strengthen into a significant hurricane, Texas Tech researchers are now near Corpus Christi awaiting the storm’s arrival. The team will deploy more than a dozen portable weather stations, called StickNets, to measure wind, temperature, pressure and more as Harvey comes ashore. The data will then be used to improve wind field modeling in the future.
The Texas Tech Hurricane Research Team has been deploying instruments in the path of tropical storms since the late 1990s, and has collected valuable data from more than two dozen storms since then.
Expert
Brian Hirth, research professor, National Wind Institute, [email protected]
Quotes*
- “Primarily, the focus is to get good wind measurements during the landfall, but we also can measure temperature, relative humidity and the pressure as the storm is making landfall.”
- “It’s been awhile since the Texas coast has seen a storm that could potentially be, you know, a hurricane of this magnitude.”
- “Not just understanding what the maximum winds are but how those winds vary. The stronger winds are closer to the center, but how do those winds vary as you move away from the center? And that will feed into efforts to help improve wind field modeling to try to better model what hurricane wind fields look like.”
*Additional sound bites on Harvey can be found on FTP site.
For more information or media resources, contact Allison Hirth, senior editor, Office of Communications and Marketing, Texas Tech University, (806) 834-5604 or [email protected]
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