Weekly Weather Report End of the Offseason

First let me go ahead and apologize for how damn long this took to get out today, we have a new student that I was helping get settled into our department, and my laptop charger decided to stop working (I literally bought this thing 2 weeks ago...)

current feelings regarding my laptop

As discussed in the title...thank christ the offseason is finally over and we can all get on the same side again until the first loss. Football is back and with is so is the weekly weather report this season I bring some of my own work to the table however; humor me for a second while I talk about our research group's work and why you should care. Our group is working on creating a brand new high resolution data set spatially and temporally using multiple satellite data sets. Why is this important? Well models use these inputs in order to draw their predictions of the future. More info = more accurate forecasts. Makes sense right?

So why should you all care? Well we've made our own model and have been forecasting for basically everything east of the Mississippi and have been able to catch severe weather outbreaks to an insanely high degree of access hours in advance. We can also pinpoint regions of precipitation in advance pretty well

However due to the computing power of this model and our desire to run it every hour to update with the satellite data we can only do it about 12 hours in advance. Our goal is to bump it onto our super computer that will be up and running here shortly to really crank out some regular interval forecasts at insanely high resolutions days in advance...but thats a dream still coming. For now yall will have to settle with the usual and my brand new gameday forecast that I will give if theres even a slight chance of precipitation or inclement weather. If you want to check out some of our plots here ya go

http://cas.hamptonu.edu/~qi.zhang/HUNWP_1.2.0_PHSnABI/ for regional stuff
http://cas.hamptonu.edu/~qi.zhang/Virginia3km_HamptonRoads1km/ for our beautiful and amazing state

Phew that was a lot, onto this week and our science discussion today:

We'll start with the science discussion, with a lot of ....erm news.... about dropping atomic bombs into hurricanes I have been asked to really dig into why this isn't a particularly a good idea.

We'll start with the obvious stuff and jump into why dropping an atomic bomb anywhere is a bad idea and we're going to make a few assumptions: First for the assumptions; we're going to assume we're dropping the bomb in the hurricane itself rather than above it in the atmosphere. So for starters fallout = super bad and incredibly difficult to get rid of. Dropping an atomic bomb in what is a giant atmospheric circulation is a great way to push all of these highly radioactive materials to shore REAL quick, which would quickly settle into our food giving us all cancer... I for one dont like cancer

Second point; I believe I have mentioned in a previous weekly weather report that the average supercell thunderstorm contains more energy than an atomic bomb, by energy of course you mean potential and kinetic energy combined. Let that sink in for a second...Now supercell storms are usually a couple of kilometers across, we'll say 5 or so. Hurricanes are hundreds of miles across indicating tons of energy. Furthermore hurricanes are different in nature due to the nature of water constantly being fed into the system, making it a much more efficient energy system. While a supercell contains energy on the scale of a single atomic weapon, a hurricane contains the energy of multiple nuclear bombs

Some calculations to make you buy in:

If you do some back of the napkin calculations; taken from world hurricane expert Kerry Emmanuel you get somewhere between 3*10^12 or 3 * 10^13 watts depending on the wind speed of the hurricane strictly from wind energy

ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/hurrpower.pdf

Now if you look at the latent heat energy released by the condensation of the rain within the hurricane the number gets even more redonculous. An average hurricane produces an average of 1.5 cm/day inside a radius of 665 km (some regions receiving more than others...See Gray 1981), now when you compute this to a volume you get ~2.1 * 10^16 cm^3/day a cubic cm of water weighs 1 gram, now when you do some latent heat calculations...

https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/1dd850de05a26e07...
latent heat calculation for those curious from wikipedia...

A hurricane is releasing about 6*10^14 Watts or 5.2*10^19 Joules/day (https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html) Yes NOAAs calculations are correct I've had to do a similar problem in a class and you reach similar conclusions.

Now how much energy does a nuclear bomb release? Admittedly a lot. the largest bomb ever detonated by the Unite States is 63,000 TJ (1 TJ = 10^12 joules). so the biggest bomb ever is producing 6.3*10^16 Joules....you're still short of a hurricane by a factor of 1000.... thats a lot. and thats compared to the biggest bomb EVER. Likewise thats not even getting into the brunt of the discussion which is the idea that it would "cancel out the pressure gradient in the storm"...It seriously would not. This is a terrible idea that has reached mainstream due to sharknado.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/embed-twit/ba038379-e867-49ba-a2be-7c7b9c2a...

Yup, while there were some theories about atomic bombs halting hurricanes in the 50s we abandoned those ideas pretty quick when we realized how silly it is. I hadn't heard much on this until sharknado...and here we are making national headlines

Phew that was a lot. Now onto the final forecast for the weekend

Those of you making the trek to Boston are in for a really good weekend weather wise. A ridge will be moving across the eastern states between now and Friday making really calm conditions. A front will push through Saturday afternoon and there may be a few scattered showers here and there but by and large it should just provide cool temperatures and the air should dry up pretty quickly before a region of high pressure over the great lakes pushes its way east leading to really calm cool conditions. It might be a tad toasty in the early afternoon but by kickoff temperatures should have dropped a bit before becoming almost chilly in the evening (60ish). Itll feel like a middle of fall kind of game which is nuts to think about on labor day weekend; perfect weather for kicking the crap out of the dudes from Boston

just dudes bein dudes right addazio?

So what does this mean for the game? With really mild and almost cool dry conditions I expect it to be a good game. No excuses on offense or defense and the lack of humidity doesn't play into BCs ground games advantage. While I dont the offense helps either team it certainly could have played into BCs hands a lot more as their big guys would wear us down quicker in awful conditions.

Final predictions

High - 76
Low - 62
light winds
little to no humidity
slightly cloudy

GO HOKIES!!!!!