Much has been learned since Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast five years ago. University researchers have made significant discoveries in hurricane tracking, analyses and response.
At the Earth Scan Laboratory, founded in 1988 and housed in the School of the Coast and Environment, researchers analyze data generated from real-time satellites to track storms.
“During hurricane season, if there’s something big in the Gulf or Caribbean, our satellites can go into rapid scan mode and get images as often as every couple of minutes,” said Nan Walker, director of ESL.
But Walker said it’s more than just images. The satellites also generate data on atmospheric and oceanic factors.
Researchers recently discovered hurricanes have the potential to intensify over areas of high heat and decrease in intensity over cooler areas, Walker said.
Walker said her most significant discovery since Hurricane Katrina came after analyzing atmospheric factors from hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ivan.
With Katrina and Rita, the hurricanes intensified dramatically over high heat areas, but Ivan showed minimal change.
“In the case of Ivan, the upper atmosphere was not conducive to intensification,” she said. “For Katrina and Rita, the conditions were perfect. Without them, the hurricane can’t reach its maximum potential, so that was a very key factor.”
Walker said this information can be used to predict how a hurricane will intensify.
“The track of the hurricane over these features is really important,” she said. “It’s moved the National Hurricane Center to a point where they’re paying a lot more attention to the ocean.”
Walker said the data will create better hurricane predictions.
While the intensity of Katrina was devastating, so were the levee failures surrounding New Orleans, which is why the University is also working on ways to mitigate their effects.
Joseph Suhayda, interim director of the LSU Hurricane Center, said the center, established in 1999 to conduct research and assist the state in coping with hurricanes, is focusing on flood insurance protection.
“We’ve got a contract with the state to assist the parishes as they try to cope with technical aspects of the National Flood Insurance Program,” he said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued new standards for levees in order to receive levee certification and credit for flood insurance protection, Suhayda said.
“A lot of our levees could potentially be decertified, meaning you could have a levee in place, but as far as FEMA is concerned, they wouldn’t give credit for it,” he said. “As we witnessed in Katrina, the presence of the levee doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be there throughout the storm.”
Suhayda said homes built inside areas with uncertified levees would need to be built to about 11 feet of elevation.
“You need to build at the same elevation inside the protected area as you do outside, and that’s what’s causing a lot of problems in the state,” he said.
“They spent a lot of money building those levees, and they’re close to being certifiable, but until they do FEMA won’t give you flood insurance rates to protect you from the 100-year flood.”
Only the levees that failed were rebuilt, while many of the original ones are still in place, said Craig Colten, geography professor.
“Some areas still have the same flaws in them,” he said.
Although new additions like flood walls, gates and barriers will mitigate surge effects, the levees are still susceptible to overflowing, Colten said.
“You won’t have the same kind of calamity that we saw in Katrina,” he said. “But the city is still susceptible to flooding.”
Most levees are designed for Category 3 hurricanes, Suhayda said.
“At this point in time, we can’t afford Category 5 protection,” he said. “If we have a hurricane in the next month, the hurricane protection system is not yet able to stop the overtopping and flooding.”
Another University organization that collects storm data is the Digital Hurricane Consortium — a collaboration of universities that monitor wind, surge, wave, rainfall intensities and damage on land-falling storms.
The consortium, formed post-Katrina, is designed to combine data from various universities including the University of Florida, Texas Tech University and the University of Notre Dame.
“Everyone can have access to a larger data set,” said Marc Levitan, civil and environmental engineering professor. “Only by combining this data can we make real progress.”
The on-campus Stephenson Disaster Management Institute was formed as a direct result of Katrina in an effort to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners, said Joseph Booth, executive director of SDMI.
As part of SDMI, researchers, managers and expert advisers collaborate to study disaster management problems and develop realistic solutions.
“We are leveraging the resources we have here on campus in order to be
better informed and make better decisions,” Booth said.
In the event of another large hurricane, Booth said there would be better coordination of resources in facilitating all levels of response.
“It would be adding extra layers of resources into the state’s response,” he said. “Things would run a lot smoother.”
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Contact Sarah Eddinggton at [email protected]