- NASA helps hurricane preparedness and response by offering satellite tv for pc information and science earlier than, throughout, and after storms.
- Throughout hurricane season, NASA delivers well timed flood maps, energy outage insights, landslide danger assessments, and extra to state and federal companions.
- NASA exams modern applied sciences, from AI fashions to mini satellites, to boost how we monitor hurricanes and their impacts.
- NASA’s long-term monitoring of wind, ocean warmth, and atmospheric moisture improves understanding of the place hurricanes would possibly type and intensify.
With the Atlantic hurricane season underway, NASA is once more gearing as much as produce cutting-edge analysis that strengthens the nation’s potential to organize for and reply to extreme climate. From satellite tv for pc imagery of our planet to improved storm modeling, the company’s work helps communities in anticipating and lowering the impacts of hurricanes.
In 2024, hurricanes together with Helene and Milton confirmed NASA’s wide-ranging capabilities. Because the storms approached america, the company’s community of satellites and scientists swung into motion. Inside hours of landfall, NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System was supplying emergency managers and others with flood maps, energy outage assessments, and different essential information.
“Individuals may be stunned how deeply NASA is concerned in hurricane science,” mentioned Scott Braun, a analysis meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We aren’t the businesses issuing forecasts or warnings, however our applied sciences and science are making elementary contributions to how we perceive, predict, and reply to those storms.”
When hurricanes strike, NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System aids state and federal businesses, producing and sharing imagery and information, together with the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal, which provides instruments to evaluate storm harm.
One essential device is NASA’s Black Marble product suite, produced and maintained by NASA Goddard. Utilizing information from the Seen Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), researchers and others can map nighttime lights and detect energy outages.
In contrast to conventional outage maps, which regularly present solely county-level information, NASA’s Black Marble can present a extra detailed view. It provides calibrated, every day observations, enabling high-confidence monitoring of neighborhood-level impacts. Emergency response groups in Florida, for example, have used this imagery to evaluate circumstances close to hazardous waste websites earlier than heading into the sphere after a hurricane.
Different NASA applied sciences map flooding. Scientists at NASA’s Marshall Area Flight Heart in Huntsville, Alabama used the European Area Company’s Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar information and different information from the NASA/U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellites and ESA’s Sentinel-2 to trace flooding after a number of hurricanes in 2024, together with Helene and Milton.
These maps had been shared by means of the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal with state and federal emergency managers responding to storms’ impacts in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and elsewhere.
“The flexibility to see floodwaters and panorama modifications provides communities a important edge throughout response and restoration,” mentioned Shanna McClain, disasters program supervisor for NASA’s Earth Science Division at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It helps decision-makers act quicker when each minute counts.”
Hurricanes don’t simply knock out energy or set off flooding — they will additionally loosen mountains. After Hurricane Helene, NASA scientists partnered with USGS to sort out a distinct menace: landslides all through the southern Appalachian Mountains. NASA’s Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness device, developed at NASA Goddard, might help spot landslide-prone areas by combining completely different troves of satellite tv for pc information.
“The landslide mannequin brings collectively a variety of Earth science,” mentioned Thomas Stanley, a analysis scientist at NASA Goddard. “It’s an actual convergence of satellite tv for pc observations — soil moisture, precipitation, elevation — each including a key piece to the puzzle.”
Within the days throughout and after Helene, a NASA-USGS group tailored this mannequin to include ground-based rainfall measurements. “This collaboration proved essential throughout the important first days when lingering clouds prevented direct satellite tv for pc imaging of landslides,” mentioned Kate Allstadt, a analysis geophysicist at USGS. “Combining NASA and USGS landslide fashions guided aerial reconnaissance over 4 states and helped prioritize areas for detailed mapping.”
NASA Disasters Response coordinators additionally partnered with USGS to manually map doubtless landslide areas in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, utilizing high-resolution satellite tv for pc imagery. This partnership enabled early warnings to businesses such because the North Carolina Geological Survey about potential landslide zones earlier than visible affirmation was potential.
As hurricanes collect power over heat ocean waters, NASA’s satellites start monitoring them. One effort offering important information on hurricanes is the World Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, a collaboration between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company. Passing over storms a couple of times per day, the GPM core satellite tv for pc captures high-resolution information on rainfall depth and distribution.
“The GPM mission provides us an inside have a look at the place a storm is dropping essentially the most rain and the way intense it’s,” mentioned George Huffman, GPM venture scientist at NASA Goddard. “That sort of info helps forecasters make higher predictions and provides communities extra time to organize for flooding and harmful circumstances.”
Huffman’s group leads NASA’s IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM) product, which mixes GPM Core Observatory information with observations from different satellites to generate close to real-time, world rainfall estimates each half-hour. For instance, IMERG tracked the record-breaking rainfall that fell throughout Hurricane Harvey in 2017, when elements of Texas noticed greater than 50 inches of rain.
Satellite tv for pc-based rainfall information could be particularly very important when an enormous storm like Harvey or Helene knocks out ground-based rain measurements, Huffman mentioned.
NASA is also working to show precipitation information into sensible flood predictions. One such effort, led by NASA-funded hydrologist Ed Beighley at Northeastern College in Boston, merges rainfall estimates from the GPM mission with Nationwide Climate Service river discharge fashions and floor water mapping strategies to establish areas prone to expertise flooding.
Throughout Hurricane Helene, his group offered early variations of those flood maps to the North Carolina Division of Well being and Human Providers.
“In some circumstances, like with Helene, we may see the place disasters had been prone to be declared simply from the rainfall information — days earlier than the catastrophe declarations had been made official,” Beighley mentioned. “That sort of close to real-time info may actually assist counties and well being departments put together and coordinate response efforts.”
That very same deal with enhancing early flood prediction was on the coronary heart of NASA’s response to Hurricane Debby when it made landfall in Florida in August 2024. At NASA Marshall, the Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) group used its Land Info System to trace soil moisture ranges, essential for understanding the potential for flooding.
The group’s Streamflow-AI mannequin — a machine studying device educated to foretell how rivers reply to rainfall — additionally forecasted rising waters in small streams and creeks in Florida and the Carolinas.
“The streamflow device is used fairly closely by the Nationwide Climate Service now to assist inform flood forecasts, which then filters all the way down to evacuation orders,” mentioned Patrick Duran, a NASA Marshall analysis scientist with SPoRT.
NASA would not simply gather information on hurricanes or help of their aftermath — it’s redefining the expertise we use to watch and perceive them. This work is just not solely enhancing forecasts and warnings but additionally serving to to gasoline the expansion of America’s business satellite tv for pc trade.
Take NASA’s TROPICS mission. Brief for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation construction and storm Depth with a Constellation of Smallsats, TROPICS represents a elementary shift in how we would monitor hurricanes from house. Fairly than relying solely on intermittent passes by bigger satellites, TROPICS uses a group of small, lower-cost satellites working in live performance to offer extra frequent observations of tropical storm methods — providing a complementary method to storm monitoring.
Throughout Hurricane Helene, the TROPICS satellites tracked the storm by means of practically its whole life cycle, capturing information on its fast intensification from a tropical melancholy to a robust class 4 hurricane earlier than landfall in Florida’s Massive Bend area.
Every TROPICS satellite tv for pc carries a microwave radiometer. In contrast to optical sensors, this instrument can see by means of clouds, making it very best for monitoring storms. The TROPICS’ radiometers are tuned to detect temperature, moisture, and precipitation patterns inside hurricanes.
“The TROPICS mission is de facto good at offering pictures of the construction of a storm, displaying how effectively outlined the attention is, which is vital for enhancing forecasting,” mentioned William Blackwell, TROPICS principal investigator at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Massachusetts.
Tomorrow.io, an American climate firm, is utilizing radiometer expertise derived from TROPICS because it develops instruments for business climate forecasting. The corporate is also working to adapt radar expertise first examined on NASA’s RainCube mission.
RainCube, a small satellite tv for pc concerning the measurement of a shoebox developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, operated from 2018 to 2020. It used radar to review precipitation, sending alerts towards Earth and analyzing how lengthy they took to bounce again, and the way sturdy they had been after reflecting off raindrops, snowflakes, and cloud ice.
Full-scale satellites have been utilizing radar expertise to make that sort of measurement for years. “The important thing factor with RainCube wasn’t bringing in new science,” mentioned Simone Tanelli, RainCube principal scientist at JPL. “As an alternative, it was displaying that we may offer you comparable information with a field that’s roughly 100 instances smaller in quantity than a full-size satellite tv for pc.”
NASA additionally exams how different small, lower-cost devices may rework how we monitor tropical storms. Two such instruments — COWVR, brief for Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer measures ocean floor winds, and TEMPEST, brief for Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Methods tracks atmospheric water vapor — had been launched to the Worldwide Area Station in 2021.
Utilizing expertise and designs from JPL and different NASA groups, TEMPEST and COWVR already are proving their worth. Their information has been utilized by the U.S. Joint Hurricane Warning Heart to assist monitor and forecast highly effective storms, reminiscent of Tropical Cyclone Mandous in December 2022.
NASA researchers are also investigating lightning, which has emerged as a key clue in predicting fast storm intensification, a harmful section of the hurricane life cycle that is without doubt one of the most tough features of hurricane forecasting. Spikes in lightning exercise, particularly within the eyewall, could be an early signal {that a} storm is about to strengthen rapidly.
The company’s SPoRT venture is researching how lightning information from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper can enhance hurricane forecasting. This sensor gives a virtually steady view of lightning exercise over oceans and in distant land areas which have fewer climate observations. The instrument rides aboard NOAA’s (Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) GOES weather satellites.
“By learning the scale and power of lightning flashes inside hurricanes, we’re studying how they could sign whether or not a storm is about to accentuate or weaken,” mentioned Duran. “It’s an evolving space of analysis with a whole lot of potential.”
Throughout Hurricane Helene, SPoRT’s lightning analyses revealed a burst of sturdy, frequent flashes within the eyewall simply earlier than the storm surged from class 2 to class 4 depth. That’s precisely the sort of sign researchers hope to detect extra reliably sooner or later.
NASA often makes use of its airplanes to check new hurricane tech, too. In a single latest instance, scientists from NASA’s Langley Analysis Heart in Hampton, Virginia, flew a cutting-edge 3-D Doppler wind lidar system throughout america, together with making passes by means of the sides of Hurricane Helene. The instrument is designed to seize high-resolution wind information that may enhance predictions of quickly evolving storms, reminiscent of hurricanes and extreme thunderstorms, the place correct wind observations are important, however typically missing.
Braun in contrast these a number of information streams — from TROPICS, GPM, and different devices — to medical imaging. “Take into consideration how medical doctors use several types of scans like X-rays, MRIs, and ultrasound to know what’s occurring inside a affected person’s physique,” he mentioned. “We’re doing one thing comparable with hurricanes. Every system provides us a distinct view of the storm’s inside construction and atmosphere, with the purpose of enhancing forecasts.”
Lengthy earlier than a hurricane takes form, NASA satellites are already scanning the worldwide ocean and ambiance, carefully monitoring the circumstances that give rise to highly effective storms. One of the crucial necessary indicators is sea floor temperature.
NASA combines information from a number of satellites and sensors — such because the Reasonable Decision Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and VIIRS — to provide sea floor temperature maps like JPL’s Multi-scale Ultra-high Resolution Sea Surface Temperature product and SPoRT’s Sea Surface Temperature Composite product. These world maps, up to date every day, help customers such because the Nationwide Climate Service.
“Having high-resolution, dependable sources of sea floor temperature information is extraordinarily helpful,” mentioned Brian McNoldy of the College of Miami, who research hurricanes. “From sooner or later to the following, these datasets assist establish which elements of the tropical Atlantic are above or under common. That info lets forecasters anticipate the place storms would possibly strengthen or weaken.”
Ocean floor temperatures are solely a part of the story. NASA additionally displays sea floor top with missions reminiscent of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich and SWOT (Floor Water and Ocean Topography), utilizing these measurements as indicators for deeper ocean warmth content material, a key supply of power fueling hurricanes.
Different NASA-built satellites and sensors measure atmospheric moisture, ocean floor winds, and atmospheric stability, all important components influencing whether or not a storm strengthens or dissipates.
NASA additionally makes use of its plane to review early storm improvement up shut. In 2022, the company’s Convective Processes Experiment-Cabo Verde airborne marketing campaign flew off the northwest coast of Africa to review climate methods that can provide rise to hurricanes.
The group centered partly on African easterly waves — swirling disturbances within the ambiance that usually develop into the seeds of Atlantic storms. One of many waves they noticed later developed into Tropical Storm Hermine. The mission additionally gathered information that very same yr simply earlier than hurricanes Fiona and Ian fashioned.
“The power of NASA’s pre-storm monitoring lies in each the breadth of measurements we take and the decades-long consistency behind them,” mentioned Will McCarty, supervisor of climate packages at NASA Headquarters.
“By combining information on sea floor temperature, ocean warmth content material, wind patterns, and extra, we are able to see early on when circumstances align dangerously — typically earlier than a storm visibly kinds,” McCarty mentioned. “It’s how we flip early warning into early motion.”