Thousands of miles from his native home of Bangladesh, LSU Hurricane Center researcher Hassan Mashriqui looks at two maps — one of his home country’s coast and the other of the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The two shallow, hurricane-prone basins are nearly identical.
The difference: when a devouring storm comes, people living along the Gulf Coast in the United States are aware of the storm’s power before it hits and know when to evacuate. But the people living in India and Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal often have no idea of a storm’s dangerous potential.
This lack of information in the past has meant thousands of lives lost and devastating damage to property and land.
But this hurricane season, Mashriqui and a few other University and Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes experts are using their spare time and some money from the state to change that.
Using knowledge of Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, a map of the Bay of Bengal, a little information about the approaching storm and the University’s supercomputer, SuperMike, researchers will be able to predict the cities a Bay hurricane will hit and how much water and land damage is expected — all the way from Louisiana.
“This is one-of-a-kind,” Mashriqui said. “Nobody has done this before for the Bay.”
Mashriqui said the research team will post the information to the LSU Hurricane Center Web site and do everything possible to get the information to the people in the affected South Asian countries.
“In ‘90-’91, people were fishing in the bay 24 hours before the storm arrived,” Mashriqui said, of the Asian people killed in a past storm.
He said the people are warned when a storm is serious, but they aren’t able to gauge how bad the impact will be on land. But now, via high resolution maps and advanced tracking devices, he and his partners hope to warn residents three to five days in advance, giving them time to board up and evacuate if necessary.
Mashriqui said he spoke with Steve Lyons, a Weather Channel hurricane expert, who was excited about LSU Hurricane Center’s proposal and vowed to use the information on Weather Channel broadcasts.
Hoping for a domino effect, Mashriqui said Bangladeshi and Indian people living in the United States will be able to get the information to their family and friends at home through e-mail and cell phones.
For now, though, the model program is funded through a Board of Regents grant and researchers’ volunteered time. But program officials hope to sell the idea to federal aid agencies and private donors in the next couple of years.
Mashriqui said once the world sees what they can do, he thinks the money will start coming in.
Ivor van Heerden, professor for the LSU Hurricane Center and director of the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, said the National Science Foundation recently took an interest in the project, giving him an invitation to a workshop in Bangladesh in December where he can show off the model’s new capabilities.
With years of research about what happens when hurricanes strike the New Orleans area, van Heerden said the geographic make-up is so similar that they know what is going to happen in the bay by Bangladesh.
Now, it is just a matter of getting the word out and trying to educate the people in the region about the model.
“Then ultimately, we hope to transfer our technology to groups in Bangladesh, so they can run the model on things on their own,” van Heerden said.