Jessica joined our summer intern program from Millersville University where she
is a sophomore studying Meteorology with a minor in Mathematics. Her research
interests include thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes.
Hurricane Ida (2009) was a long-lived late-season hurricane (4 November – 10
November) that caused substantial amounts of rainfall along the Mid-Atlantic
coast. At its peak, Ida was a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained wind
speeds of 90 knots (~46 m/s), but quickly weakened to a tropical storm due to
cold ocean temperatures and strong vertical shear. After making landfall on 10
November as a tropical storm, Ida quickly became an extratropical cyclone, which
merged with an occluded front and spawned a new upper-level cyclone. Due to a
low-level anticyclone in the northeast US, Ida’s remnants stalled, producing
large amounts of rainfall along the East coast, with a maximum of 18 inches
(~46 cm) in southeast Virginia. As of July 2011, Hurricane Ida is the most
recent significant tropical cyclone to have made landfall on the United States,
causing $300+ million in damage from flooding, winds, and storm surge. Ida's
genesis probability was not forecast as "medium" (30-50%) until just 18 hours
before genesis and only shortly before Ida's landfall did models have
reasonably accurate precipitation forecasts.
This study looks at precipitation forecasts from 09 November and 11 November
from the NAM, GFS, and HWRF out to 72 hours from initialization time. Each
models' quantitative precipitation forecast is analyzed and evaluated against
each other as well as the actual observed rainfall.
Jessica's summer research poster,
A Comparison of Model Precipitation Forecasts for Hurricane Ida (2009), may be found here (5MB).
Jessica has many hobbies including cross stitching, swimming, playing X-Box,
watching The Office and The OC, making bracelets and baking.
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