Dr. Kim Wood

just because it's only over land, but also from satellites because satellites get that bird's eye, well, bird in space eye of what's going on in the atmosphere.

And through a process called data assimilation, we bring all that information together to then give the computer model, which a whole bunch of talented scientists and engineers have worked on to make sure it's as good as it can be for now and then continue tweaking over time.

And that model takes those initial conditions.

And if a hurricane is currently active or a tropical cyclone is currently active and planes have been flying through or around it to take measurements, those will be brought into those initial conditions to help the model better capture the current state of the atmosphere so that we're starting from a more accurate point to predict what it'll do next.

And then the computer model is running a whole bunch of physics equations and making certain assumptions depending on how the model is set up, because we can't simulate at every single point in existence.

It would never be done in time.

So then the computer model will produce these forecasts of what the atmosphere could be like in six hours, 12 hours, so on and so forth.

And those outputs help us identify things like, do we think the storm has certain potential to get strong really fast?

Something called rapid intensification.

What might it do size-wise?

Is it getting bigger, smaller, that sort of thing?

And then where is it going to go?

But if you're trying to visualize what could be making a storm move a certain way, it's the flow of the atmosphere around it.

That makes sense.

And the computer models are helping us capture that aspect as well as what the storm itself is doing.

It's a combination of both.

Okay.

So the infrastructure we build in places at risk of hurricane impacts ideally would be built with those potential impacts in mind.

And they often either aren't or they aren't consistently.

So if it's been a while since a hurricane has hit, people might be like, oh, I don't need to invest all this extra money or time into making sure this house is exactly up to these standards.