Storm Dennis has battered parts of Iceland, Ireland and the U.K with catastrophic flooding, damaging wind and rough seas. And when Dennis’s central pressure dropped to 920 mb on Saturday February 15th, Dennis officially became the 2nd strongest non-tropical storm on record in the North Atlantic.
Much like a large and powerful hurricane, storms like Dennis require constant monitoring and recording of observations that can be fed into forecast models to account for uncertainties and ultimately provide more accurate information to emergency managers and the general public. But alas, this is not the reality. Over a period of at least 72 hours, as Dennis was feeding off extremely favorable atmospheric conditions and strengthening to one of the most powerful winter time storms on record, the world was blind to what was actually happening inside the storm.
There are only two ways to obtain surface and upper atmosphere observations for storms that are located over the ocean; 1) buoy/ship in person measurements and 2) remotely sensed retrievals. As you can see in the image below, there were no buoys anywhere close to the storm center, and you can be quite sure that no ship was going anywhere near such a powerful storm.
On Saturday February 15th as Dennis reached its peak intensity, the storm was well outside the range of ocean buoys (black dots) that would typically relay key observations on temperature, wind speed, wave height and precipitation rates. (Source www.coolwx.com)
So that leaves just remote sensing (space based) observations. But not all remote sensing observation platforms are created equally. We can get plenty of excellent pictures of storms like Dennis at nearly continuous 1-minute intervals from geostationary satellites like the one that took the picture shown below. But these images cannot see what’s going on underneath the clouds, including all the way to the ocean surface.
Visual imagery of storm Dennis on February 15th, taken by NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite. Images like these are extremely useful, but do not actually provide any upper atmosphere or surface observations.
It’s the observations of the internal workings of a storm like Dennis that make the biggest impact on forecasts and weather models. And there is a way to get those types of observations by using instrumentation that makes measurements in the microwave spectrum of radiation. Organizations like NOAA, NASA and the MetOffice have a few satellites in orbit equipped with such instrumentation, and they were able to capture some crucial observations of Dennis (such as the surface wind observations shown below, obtained from the microwave instrumentation aboard the MetOp satellites), but only when the satellites passed over the track of the storm.
Advanced Scatterometer ASCAT from MetOp satellites A, B, and C overlaid on MSG-11 10.8 um infrared imagery valid ~1700 UTC on 15 February. ASCAT measurements use a low end microwave channel to record surface winds over the ocean.
There are just 11 operational satellites (all owned by government agencies) with instrumentation capable of making microwave based weather observations. Such a shortage of platforms with this critical observation recording capability results in inevitable gaps, and that can be deadly when it comes to a storm like Dennis.
It’s these gaps in observations that drive the development of OMS’s Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS). By miniaturizing the microwave based instrumentation and placing them on dozens of CubeSat platforms in a global constellation, no longer would we need to wait several hours to see what’s happening inside and around a powerful storm like Dennis. And it’s that kind of real time, observation based information that can ultimately save lives and property, and it’s a capability that we as a society are still lacking today.
Gregory Porter
Meteorologist/ Director of UK Business Development