Safety Issues: Calculating the Path of a Hurricane

(2005-09-21) SafetyIssues.com

Part 2 in the SafetyIssues.com series on newest safety patents and what the inventors teach us about facing natural disasters.

A new method of calculating the path of a hurricane was invented by Ik-Ju Kang of Glen Carbon, Illinois. The U.S. patent was granted February 10, 2004. Kang explains the patent and why it was developed.

"A hurricane is a major weather event that can cause a tremendous amount of property damage and death. To avoid deaths, people located in the potential path of a hurricane are often warned to leave the area. The flight of these people can cause huge traffic congestion, as well as panic buying of emergency supplies, such as gasoline, batteries, food, etc.

At the present time, there is no reliable means of determining the path that a hurricane will take. Accordingly, hurricane warnings span large geographical areas. Because the hurricane may not actually appear in the warned area, many people are forced to leave their homes due to false warnings.

In addition, due to the current unpredictability of the paths of hurricanes, hurricanes may make landfall in areas where people have not received adequate warning. In these areas, there may be a significant loss of life because people have not had an opportunity to vacate.

Accordingly, there is a need in the art for the accurate prediction of the path of a hurricane.

Currently, it is well-accepted by hurricane experts that the path of a hurricane must be predicted using a particle model. The particle model predicts qualitatively the path of a hurricane in its lifetime. Specifically, the particle model predicts that the path of a hurricane is West from birth, veers to the North, and then veers Northeast.

Use of the particle model requires data regarding many physical properties of the hurricane system. For example, the convection velocity at the center of the hurricane, including magnitude and direction must be measured. Making this measurement has proved to be more difficult, or even impractical, as some data must be acquired at a location where water vapor is condensing and imparting an additional energy boost into the convection current, thereby increasing its magnitude and altering the direction of convection velocity.

In addition, the particle model reflects the overwhelming influence of the coriolis force. Use of the coriolis force results in the ability of experts to predict the path of a hurricane over the course of a long period of time, e.g. 1 week or more. Unfortunately, this time period does not provide any predictive accuracy over short time periods. Therefore, a great deal of uncertainty is introduced into the prediction of a hurricane path for the immediate future. A particle model also requires that data be collected simultaneously.

In addition, a hurricane will occasionally 'bounce' off of a land mass and be reflected backwards into the ocean. The particle model does not explain or predict this behavior accurately.

Thus, with the particle model, the data is transient, difficult to obtain, and must be collected simultaneously.

Due to the lack of accuracy and the problems associated with data acquisition, a new approach to modeling is required.

It is in view of the above problems that the present invention was developed. The invention is a method of predicting the future path of a hurricane by discarding all of the existing particle model approaches and taking a wave model approach, and more specifically, taking a pulse wave approach. Because there is no known approach to using a pulse wave model for hurricanes, the present invention must take a new approach in order to achieve this goal.

The present invention utilizes isothermal or isobaric lines, together with information on the current hurricane path, and applies a wave model to predict the future path of the hurricane."

Further features and advantages of this invention, as well as the structure and operation of various embodiments of the invention, are described in detail with accompanying drawings at:

Method of Calculating the Path of a Hurricane
http://www.safetyissues.org/pn.htm?6691035

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SafetyIssues.com
Contact: John Simmons,
Chief Technology Officer
703-992-6689
johnsimmons@safetyissues.org