Hurricanes Katrina hit coastal Louisiana and Mississippi on August 29, 2005.
The Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), a program office within NOAA’s National Satellite and Information Service (NESDIS), develops satellite-based products and tools to support weather forecasts with high quality, consistent data. These satellite products produce critical, timely information to forecasters at the NWS and the National Hurricane Center (NHC), having STAR play an essential role during hurricane season.
The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), another office at NESDIS, supports STAR’s hurricane work by archiving and maintaining their long-term data records. These records include tropical cyclone precipitation, geostationary images, sea surface temperature, ocean heat and other environmental datasets.
Hurricanes Katrina and Ida hit Louisiana on August 29, 2005 and 2021, respectively. The images show the spatial extent of each storm. Drag the center button left or right to adjust the comparison.
NHC and other hurricane offices use the data to train predictive models and to test advances in model formulation. An example is a site that archives historical satellite images of hurricanes since 2019. STAR also provides tropical cyclone-centric visualizations with NESDIS on operational and experimental products through the Tropical Cyclone Real Time page, which is developed and supported by STAR scientists at Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA). For the past two decades, it has been providing data and imagery to the tropical cyclone community.
NCEI also works with STAR to archive and maintain data products like the Satellite Ocean Heat Content Suite (SOHCS) and International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS). The entire time series of SOHCS is mined for conditions during previous storms and used to train rapid intensification prediction models during hurricane season. IBTrACS contains the most comprehensive global collection of tropical cyclones data currently available. Combining recent and historical tropical cyclone data brings vital insights to forecasters and scientists so they can better understand these storms.
STAR’s work developing the algorithms that translate raw satellite data into usable information on the meteorology and oceanography of hurricanes and NESDIS management of the data both play an important role in hurricane season observing and forecasting.