DesignSafe Radio

Today’s guest is Frank Marks, legendary NOAA meteorologist and tropical cyclone expert. Since the 1980s, he’s flown 10,000 hours on NOAA’s P3 Orion aircraft, including through many, many hurricanes. Marks, who now leads NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, clearly enjoys learning. He shares some of his favorite experiences with us. The P3 Orion Marks discusses the P3 aircraft capabilities and describes flying into his first hurricane, Hurricane Alan. After that ride, he explains, seeing the data coming in through all the instruments, he was hooked. He discusses early experiments trying to understand the nature of the hurricane eyewall replacement cycle. The Doppler revolution In 1981, another highlight for Marks was the addition of Doppler radar to the P3 aircraft, which he describes as a revolutionary technique for understanding the three-dimensional structure of storms. Marks details the ways that Doppler, which he calls a “CAT scan of the wind,” improved scientific understanding of hurricanes. A watershed for meteorologists, Doppler data helped scientists figure out storm structure and how they work. He recalls the enthusiasm with which he and his colleagues “did some of the best science ever.” Surviving Hugo One of Marks’s scariest experiences, complete with a P3 engine on fire, involves flying into category 5 Hurricane Hugo at 1,500 feet. It wasn’t exactly planned, he explains, to fly that low into wind speeds over 150 MPH. He describes the miscalculations, the incredible view — and how the crew survived the experience. “The data was incredible,” he says, “And it was a labor of love to analyze.” Rainfall climatology Over and over, Marks says, serendipity played a role in his work. He describes working with a NASA team interested in tropical storms called the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a satellite system that examined storms around the globe. By chance he stopped to chat with the TRMM chief scientist, and he ended up volunteering to analyze the TRMM hurricane data — which had yet to be examined. That, in turn, led to a project that used TRMM to devise global climatology for 700 tropical systems. Connecting to TACC In 2008, after a series of active and damaging hurricane seasons, NOAA formed a committee to improve forecasts, which became the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project that Marks now leads. By chance, the team was offered 1 million hours on the newly available Texas Advanced Computer Center – an opportunity to put the new system through its paces. Marks describes the challenge of feeding large weather datasets to the models on the TACC system. Fortunately, the data scientist on his team made it all work. That pioneering experiment laid the groundwork for today’s weather scientists to use supercomputers like TACC for accurate and real-time hurricane forecasts.

Legendary hurricane hunter Frank Marks Today’s guest is Frank Marks, legendary NOAA meteorologist and tropical cyclone expert. Since the 1980s, he’s flown 10,000 hours on NOAA’s P3 Orion aircraft, including through many, many hurricanes. Marks, who now leads NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, clearly enjoys learning. He shares some of his favorite experiences with us. Curiosity and a career path. He got curious about weather in grade school. His neighbor, a science teacher, kept weather instruments in his yard. Soon Marks was one of his students, learning how to make measurements with such instruments. He joined the school’s weather club and learned things like how to decode meteorological messages that came in by teletype machine. He explains using “old fashioned” methods of gathering and interpreting data to make forecasts, which were and posted at school every day. He lived near an IBM facility, and he describes a senior class project that involved learning how to program an IBM computer, using punch cards, to do meteorological work. In college, Marks enjoyed learning from brilliant professors and became interested in fluid dynamics. In graduate school at MIT, he had an opportunity to do a three-month internship in Senegal -- to work on an important Atlantic tropical weather experiment that involved multiple aircraft and a fleet of weather ships. It was a life-changing experience. Marks urges young researchers to take risks when opportunities knock. He details his “trial by fire” during that internship, which included doing a lot of analysis by hand. Eventually, by studying lots of data and watching for patterns, he became an expert on tropical convection variability. That internship led to a job offer from NOAA’s hurricane research lab — where he’s worked for the past 37 years.

In the U.S., in the wake of the 2017 hurricanes, she and her team helped coordinate recon teams in Texas, post Hurricane Harvey. She describes reconnaissance efforts as a way for to see if engineers “got it right.” Was it a problem with the structure or codes? Or did the hazard deliver an unexpected load? Unlike with laboratory and computer simulations, after a disaster, engineers get to forensically try to find out what exactly happened. Trying to capture the hazard loading on one hand and on the other, understand what the structure’s capacity was. Reconnaissance teams get to ask “Why?” On reconnaissance missions, teams not only gather data, they interact with people in the community. She says she learned that people’s political and religious beliefs affected their willingness to prepare for disaster. Trust in government or religious fatalism both inclined people to invest less in securing their homes and property. Understanding such community attitudes can help engineers reach people in language they can understand. She says in religious communities, it makes sense to have workshops on resilience and preparedness run through their church, by their pastors. She describes making recon assessments, covering dozens of homes each day. Her teams use an application called Fulcrum, a mobile data collector. This season, her teams in Texas post-Harvey collected 1,685 assessments; in Florida post-Irma 1,094 assessments; and in Puerto Rico after Maria 260 assessments. The team in the Virgin Islands is currently collecting data. Kijewski-Correa says she always includes time to speak with people, even though it slows things down. People who have been through disaster often ask questions about their homes, and she answers as best she can. She describes being amazed at the strength of people she met in Texas, who showed true American spirit. “Strength greater than a building,” she says. She discusses how communities make decisions, even without much data. They took care of their neighbors, which was what they did know. But to carry out new engineering ideas, people need to trust. Engineers need to know how communities make decisions, what the barriers are to rebuilding, what the opportunities are. She calls it “the last mile problem.” Engineers need to know all the things that must happen so that the community can adopt a new system. No matter how good the engineers’ math is, they need that data to close the deal, to complete the rebuilding. Kijewski-Correa looks forward to NSF-funded projects that are able to collaborate with other funding agencies – in order to do what’s necessary to complete the rebuilding of disaster-damaged communities. “It can’t just be a miracle when the work is all the way complete. We have to do something more systematic,” she says. The last mile takes hard work and commitment, she says. If engineers are doing research to save lives and property, then more human-centered, interdisciplinary research is necessary, including cobbling together different sources of funding. For her part, she looks to NGOs, foundations, public and private sector funding. She says engineers need to stop talking to engineers, stop coming to conferences, and start talking with social scientists and public policy experts. Have new conversations, she says. In Haiti, where she and others trained locals in engineering basics, she says the people were accustomed to using their own ingenuity for solving problems: designing stoves, inventing ways to handle flooding. One evening one of her Haitian “problem solvers” described the problem: “The answer was always inside us, but no one bothered to show us.” The statement resonated with Kijewski-Correa, the idea that answers reside inside us, within every community. She sees it as her job is to empower people to implement those answers. To help them tap their ability be part of the process. Resilience is inside all of us, she says. She is committed to helping everyone find that answer.

We all have a story to tell about how natural hazards have impacted our lives. Today, we hear from listeners and past podcast guests about their personal encounters with hazards and their aftermath.

Engineer Tracy Kijewski-Correa has been doing post-disaster reconnaissance missions since 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami. On today’s episode, host Dan Zehner talks with Kijewski-Correa about assessing structural damage and the difficulty of rebuilding communities hit by a natural disaster. At Notre Dame, Kijewski-Correa holds a dual position in engineering and global affairs, the first engineer there to hold such a joint appointment. With her engineering background, she studies how political, socio-economic, religious and cultural norms come into play when making public policy decisions – including preparing for disasters and re-building after one. She cites the example of Haiti, where seven years after a major earthquake the country is still not returned to normal. Thanks to NGOs and others, there are new materials and skill sets to build resilient houses in Haiti, but because people do not have access to mortgages, many Haitians are still in shelters, waiting for financing to access those new homes. She explains that the engineering world lacks proper pipelines for linking fundamental research, such as post-disaster assessment, to concrete advancements in building codes, or practical advocacy programs. What holds back progress, she says, is that different funding agencies have differing priorities and timelines – making it hard to link the projects and complete the work necessary. After Hurricane Sandy, there was a remarkable coordination of NSF RAPID funding, which documented the damage, sustained funding from Army Corps of Engineers, to develop the coastal hazard simulation tool to map and recommend structural changes, and then funding from the state of New Jersey, which was necessary to implement the changes. It was a rare example of early seed funding, linked to translational funding down a pipeline that led to successfully rebuilding the area. Dual appointment engineers are pioneers, she says. You have to have an understanding of social constructs – if you want stuff to really happen. Academia traditionally does not focus on solving real problems, she explains. With her dual appointment, she tries to push the traditional research/education model to do more translational work. For most engineers, translational work is like a “night job,” work done on weekends and evenings. During the day, engineers do traditional, NSF-funded research, work that leads to publishing. Work such as post-earthquake reconnaissance or community-building, has to be done in an academic’s free time. And it takes years to make a difference. She’s grateful that Notre Dame recognizes the importance of having engineers with a dual focus. She credits it small size and its religious mission. Kijewski-Correa details the problems in Haiti, starting with difficulty reaching the cities after the 2010 earthquake. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 made the situation even worse. It was a struggle to move from reconnaissance to rebuilding. When a major earthquake struck Chile in 2016, she says that NGOs and funding agencies left Haiti for Chile, calculating they could be of more use in a country with an infrastructure similar to one many Western cities. Kijewski and her team are the only NGOs working to rebuild in Haiti, currently.

Do you ever wonder how meteorologists get their hurricane data? On today’s show, host Dan Zehner gets the answers from Commander Justin Kibbey, one of NOAA’s “hurricane hunter” pilots. Kibbey flies NOAA’s P-3 Orion aircraft missions straight into hurricanes, multiple times, while a crew of weather experts and technicians gather data to predict the path and strength of the storm. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Kibbey spent 10 years doing aerial reconnaissance and wartime flights over places like Iraq and Afghanistan. He flew the P-3, a four-engine turboprop designed to fly low and hunt submarines. After his Naval service, Kibbey joined NOAA’s crew of hurricane hunters, where he is wrapping up his eighth season. Kibbey describes NOAA’s rugged planes (built in the 1970s and based on 1950s designs) as flying research laboratories. The aircraft are powerful, with redundant systems, and built to fly low. Each mission is crewed with 15-20 people: NOAA officers, navigators, government and civilian technicians and meteorologists – and scientists, all working to collect data as they fly though hurricane storms. Kibbey describes the low altitude flights (5,000 to 12,000 feet), aiming for the “sweet spot,” or the eye of the storm, to get what he calls “an MRI” of the hurricane. In the no-wind, low-pressure center, researchers gather data for creating the spaghetti models that the public studies to see where a storm will travel. One tool used by hurricane hunters is tail Doppler radar, which reveals a storm’s inner structure. The missions also deploy “dropsondes” small cylindrical tubes that fall through the atmosphere measuring pressure, temperature, humidity and wind speed, providing a profile of a column of air. Assembled together, these data paint an accurate picture of a storm and its intensity. NOAA’s planes cover the breadth of a storm, 400 miles or more. While satellites can provide some data, a plane in the storm provides the most and most accurate information. Kibbey describes flying through Superstorm Sandy, the largest he’s experienced. He also recalls his first mission as a hurricane hunter, an eight-hour flight through Hurricane Earl. It was a white-knuckle ride, until the plane passed into the eye. He describes the shock of seeing stars overhead – and a bolt of lightning that lit up the entire eye wall. One of his most turbulent flights was in Hurricane Irma, which put the plane through the wringer, he says. The crew on this flight was particularly stressed – because many of them had family in the path of the hurricane. The goal for hurricane hunters is to find out where the storm is will go, via reconnaissance and research. Technology constantly improves, and Kibbey speculates someday the research can be gathered remotely. Already, crews launch UAVs into hurricanes, into places too dangerous to fly a plane. And satellites may one day be able make readings as accurate as instruments on flying laboratories. Until then, from June through November, hurricane hunters fly through storms gathering data that can save lives. Hurricane data, including photos, from the 2017 hurricane season http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/data_sub/hurr.html More about NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters https://www.omao.noaa.gov/learn/aircraft-operations/about/hurricane-hunters Hurricane Hunters on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/NOAAHurricaneHunters/ National Hurricane Center, to see data collected by the Hurricane Hunters. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ Justin Kibbey http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Storm_pages/edouard2014/LCDRJustinKibbeyN42RF(DavidHall).jpg

What does it mean to do “reconnaissance” after a natural disaster? To find out, host Dan Zehner catches up with Ellen Rathje, an earthquake engineer at the University of Texas, Austin. Among her many interests, Rathje is a founding member and co-chair of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association (http://www.geerassociation.org). Rathje explains that although she originally wanted to be a journalist, she really liked math in high school. When she learned that civil engineers worked on big projects like bridges, she was hooked. During her undergraduate years at Cornell, the Loma Prieta earthquake occurred. She was fascinated. She decided she wanted to be the kind of engineer who designed structures that could withstand earthquakes. In 1999, as a new faculty member at UT, she was selected for a reconnaissance team investigating Turkey’s Kocaeli earthquake, a 7.6 magnitude temblor that killed 17,000 people. Rathje describes the experience and the damage she encountered, including liquefaction. On this trip, she says she came to understand the importance of collecting post-disaster information. She says natural disasters are “Nature’s large-scale tests.” With reconnaissance, we can begin to understand the results of the tests. Rathje describes GEER, an NSF-funded association that organizes recon teams. With modest federal funding, GEER volunteers document natural disaster events large and small. To date, more than 50 events have been documented, and all the reports are available on the GEER website (http://www.geerassociation.org/reconnaissance-reports/map-view). Rathje says technology is enabling better and better observations. She describes hunting for paper maps and using a camera with 3.5” floppy discs in 1999. Hand-held GPS devices helped provide latitude and longitude for observations and photos. Later came geotagging. GEER teams were among the first to geotag photos. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a 7.0 magnitude quake that killed hundreds of thousands of people, technology was much more advanced. Rathje describes using Google Earth and digital camera synching. New recon tools included high-resolution aerial photography. Teams used sensors and weights for measuring shear wave velocity. In 2017, Rathje says, technology such as LIDAR and drones allow for fast, relatively inexpensive 3D models of damage, models which can be used in perpetuity for research. In less than 20 years, reconnaissance efforts have changed dramatically. Now, it is possible to get high quality datasets and make them publically available. Rathjes, the PI for NHERI’s cyberinfrastructure, DesignSafe, says the goal is to provide a mechanism for researchers to publish and organize their datasets for the whole research community. She discusses DesignSafe’s online data repository and the ability for researchers to publish data, much like a research paper, as a scholarly contribution. DesignSafe researchers access and analyze data in the cloud. In the Discovery workspace, tools include Jupyter and Matlab for lab experiments and simulations. Rathje describes DesignSafe’s Reconnaissance Portal with provides access to hazard event datasets. Currently, NHERI-affiliated recon teams are providing data from recent natural disasters in Mexico, Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Rathje says the most difficult disaster she experienced was the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where so many people lost their lives. Her team brought their own food, stayed in tents, and worked under the protection of armed guards. After the recon mission was over, her team worked with the United Nations to educate local Haitians about geotechnics, which would help them in rebuilding efforts.

This week Dan meets storm chaser Warren Causey, founder of The Sirens Project. Causey, an engineer with a lifelong passion for weather, studies tornadoes from a safe distance, using unmanned aerial vehicles, drones. In the interview, Causey describes growing up in Georgia and chasing storms in the mountainous Southeast, in Dixie Alley. Hoping to design weather research systems, he studied mechanical engineering, including 3D modeling and drone development. Chemistry gelled with college classmates Nolan Lunsford and Brent Bouthiller, he says, “And it escalated from there.” The three formed The Sirens Project. They study supercells and tornadoes by guiding UAVs directly into the storms. Causey details how Sirens started as a Kickstarter project, and he discusses the team’s partnership with Ag Eagle, a UAV manufacturer specializing in rugged UAVs used in farming applications. As citizen scientists, the team is careful to avoid intercepting tornadoes near populated areas. He describes the ideal intercept: a slow-moving EF4 tornado in Kansas, in the middle of nowhere. He relates his experience with the El Reno, Oklahoma, tornado on May 31, 2013. Several storm chasers lost their lives that day, including the respected meteorologist Tim Samaras, when the storm made an unexpected change-of-course. The tragic incident spurred Causey to start The Sirens Project, a safer way to study storms. Causey says working with fellow researchers is necessary for gathering more data — data that will lead to improved forecasting and storm-resistant structures. Ultimately, he wants to create models for forecasting convection, which would allow for mapping how and where tornadoes will “fire” — which would reduce false-alarms. The supercell storms that spawn tornadoes change abruptly, require many variables to generate a tornado, and are very short-lived, all of which makes tornadoes more difficult to forecast than hurricanes. The Sirens Project team is prepping for the 2018 storm season and producing a documentary on stormchasing. Causey encourages fellow weather enthusiasts to contact the group. “We love interacting with other stormchasers,” he says.

Host Dan Zehner interviews Crystal Felima, a social anthropologist who focuses on natural hazard risks and recovery in Haiti. She collects stories from residents to better understand the country’s responses to hurricanes, flooding and earthquakes. Currently, Felima is a PhD candidate at the University of Florida at Gainesville. By providing a social understanding of how disasters affect vulnerable populations in Haiti, her work is a bridge to effective technical hazard research. Felima discusses her immersive studies in the northern and southern parts of the island nation, learning the language and cultural customs. She describes a riverside community near the city of Cap-Haïtien where residents commonly use landfill materials to create new ground for building houses. The reclaimed land floods easily and the practice worsens flooding in nearby towns. For vulnerable people trying to make better lives for themselves, Felima explains, such risks are acceptable. She cites a Haitian proverb: behind every mountain is a mountain, which she says illustrates the people’s quietly ironic view of life as a series of obstacles. Haitians may face difficulties, but they are resilient. She discusses government efforts to prepare the populace for impending storms, but many rural areas are not electrified, which makes mass communication difficult. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew devastated southern portions of the country. Hundreds died, and many more were displaced. The destruction of farms had long-term effects on the availability of fresh food for the region. People are still struggling. As she collects stories from survivors, she’s learned how much people depend on aid from their communities and personal relationships – family, neighbors and relatives abroad. Gathering stories about disasters from Haitian people helps Felima understand the complexities involved in preparing for and recovering from natural disasters in Haiti, especially in poor areas. She hopes her continued research and insights will help engineers and builders improve the infrastructure in these areas.

This week, host Dan Zehner catches up with Tom Iovino, the public information director for the Florida Department of Health in Manatee County. Iovino, who mans the county’s emergency operations center during hurricanes, talks about storm preparation in the Tampa Bay area and about what he learned from Hurricane Irma. Although the Florida forecast was dire, precipitating the largest evacuation in the state’s history, Hurricane Irma took an unexpected eastward course, which improved the forecast dramatically and left the Tampa-Orlando area relatively unscathed. Despite relatively light damage, however, there was plenty to learn from this storm. For days after the storm, a major problem was lack of power. Iovino lists items missing in his own hurricane kit: an extra flashlight, a power brick, and a battery-operated fan. Traffic accidents were frequent, he says, due to incautious drivers sailing through intersections with no traffic lights. While he and his area first-responders hunkered down to wait out the storm, his center was still getting phone calls from people who decided – at the last minute – that they needed help. Such poor planning endangers the lives of first responders, and he warned that even first responders cannot rescue people in the midst of a Cat 5 hurricane. Iovino urges everyone in hurricane-prone regions to plan ahead, and the best way to know if the threat is serious is to listen to the National Weather Service. Iovino recalls what a beloved area weatherman, Dick Fletcher, was fond of saying: “If you don’t listen to what the emergency managers are telling you, you are betting your life they are wrong.” Iovino urges everyone to be safe and plan ahead, to take what they’ve learned from the last storm and apply it to the next.