Hugh Edward Willoughby

Dr. Willoughby is a Research Professor and Senior Scientist with the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. At FIU, he teaches Meteorology and is working to establish academic and research programs in both that field and Wind Engineering. His research interests include analysis of instrumented aircraft observations of hurricanes and formulation of theoretical models of tropical–cyclone motion and intensification. Until December 2002 he was a Research Meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, where he had worked since 1975 and served as director 1995-2002. He has made more than 400 research and reconnaissance flights into the eyes of typhoons and hurricanes. During his time at HRD, Dr. Willoughby occupied the G. J. Haltiner Visiting Research Chair at the Naval Postgraduate School (January–July, 1991); was a Visiting Research Scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia (June–July, 1988); and was a Visiting Lecturer at the Shanghai Typhoon Institute (December 1985), where he visited again during the winter of 2004.

Before joining HRD, Dr. Willoughby was a commissioned officer in the U. S. Navy. He served as a flight meteorologist in Airborne Early Warning Squadron ONE (1970–1971) and on the Military faculty of the Naval Academy (1971–1974), where he taught meteorology, oceanography, geology, and computer science. He left active duty as a Lieutenant (O3).

Dr. Willoughby has the following academic degrees: Ph.D. (1977, Atmospheric Science) from the University of Miami, M.S. (1969, Meteorology) from the Naval Postgraduate School, and B.S.(1967, Geophysics–Geochemistry) from the University of Arizona. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and Sigma Xi. He is past chair the AMS Committee on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology.

Hurricane Forecasting for Engineers

Citizens, enterprises, and governments in the path of a cyclone want answers to these questions: Is it coming here? How strong will it be? What will be the impacts in my neighborhood? What should I do to prepare or evacuate?

In the past, a forecast was considered successful if it specified the intensity (measured by strongest winds or lowest barometric pressure) and path of the hurricane for 24 through 72 hours in the future. By the 1990s, users came to expect more specific details, including spatial distributions of rainfall, winds, inland flooding, storm surge and high seas, for lead-times as long as 120 hours. The forecaster’s dominant tools are increasingly elaborate numerical models that that integrate the Navier-Stokes equations starting from global observations of past and present weather. A salient difficulty lies in “sensitivity to initial conditions,” wherein numerical forecasts based upon incrementally different characterizations of the current state of the atmosphere lead to wildly different predictions.

Meteorologists have maintained homogenous statistics that provide reliable metrics of forecast performance for more than a half-century. These “verification” statistics show that track forecast errors decrease steadily by 1-2% annually, whereas intensity forecasts remain only a little better than what one might expect from the simplest statistical extrapolations. In terms of outcomes, early 21^st century forecasting prevents 90% of the hurricane-related mortality that would occur with techniques used in the 1950s, but it is difficult to demonstrate a significant reduction in property damage. Also, the economic and human impacts of the response to forecasts and warnings are poorly known.