Mapping Hurricanes

One of nature's most disruptive and unpredictable occurrences are hurricanes. Clint Dawson, professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, is working on high-resolution visualizations at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to decrease this uncertainty.

Transcript

00:00:12 [ Music ] ^M00:00:10 >> There's still way too much uncertainty in hurricanes. They're very unpredictable, and that's one of the things that we're trying to do is to inform people about the risk and risk is uncertain. >> For almost 20 years, Engineering Professor Clint Dawson has been trying to minimize that risk by tracking hurricanes and simulating their impact. With the assistance of the Texas Advance Computing Center, his team has become a vital resource for emergency response. >> Well, we have to have visual tools to be able to show the emergency managers what's going to happen.

00:00:45 So these machines behind us give us the capability to give really high resolution, visualization of that output. They're taking maps of the region and we overlay our storm surge on top of that and then they can see where the storm surge is going to be the highest, what region needs to be evacuated, what highways might be blocked. And so they make decisions based on that. >> In 2008, with Hurricane Ike bearing down on the Gulf Coast, state officials called upon Dawson's team for critical information. >> Hurricane Ike was only a category two storm, but it was a very devastating storm. And we knew it way in advance.

00:01:23 We were just--actually Ike was--could've been a lot worst. If it had been 10 miles down the coast, with the maximum storm surge would've hit Houston. And Houston really did dodge bullet on that one. But we didn't know that until the last minute because you don't know, you know, maybe 12 hours before the storm actually makes land fall where it's going to hit and then you can sort of save a certainty where the maximum storm surge is going to be. So it's better to be safe than sorry. It's not perfect even with the resources that we have, it's still not perfect. There's still work to be done.