Fighting for
Fighting to improve hurricane forecasts
Researchers at Notre Dame are improving hurricane forecast accuracy, giving officials time to evacuate and protect residents.


John Antapasis, the emergency management director for the city of Tampa, remembers Hurricane Andrew. It was 1992, and folks like him watched with anxiety as the storm picked up strength over the Atlantic Ocean and then struck Florida with extreme Category 5 intensity. That hurricane left 65 people dead and $27.3 billion in damage, including the destruction of more than 63,500 homes.
Back then, knowing where and how hard a storm would hit was challenging to estimate, making decisions about where and when to evacuate nerve-racking. Today, Antapasis notes, the cone of uncertainty, or the estimation from meteorologists about where a storm may hit land, is much more specific. New technology and understanding have made those guesses more accurate, but knowing how strong a storm will be at landfall remains a challenge.
David Richter, the Frank M. Freimann Collegiate Professor of Environmental Fluid Dynamics in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, hopes to change that.




Richter teaches courses in both engineering and philosophy, including those attended by Johan Rengifo '26 and Brynn O'Donnell '25.
Forecasting from inside the storm
To explain his work, Richter used to show a clip from the 1996 movie Twister, until his Gen-Z undergraduates no longer recognized it. The iconic scene where the truck containing a data-gathering instrument is sucked into the tornado is a memorable image. While he noted that tornadoes and hurricanes are very different, in both, measurements from inside the storm can provide critical information.
“A lot of the problem of actually being able to forecast them and predict them comes down to not being able to make measurements in the most extreme parts of them,” Richter said. “Traditional ways of making measurements are limited in that they’re coming from only high up in the atmosphere or from satellites in space. And what we need to do to make the next step is actually make measurements down near the ocean surface where a lot of the action is happening.”
Richter’s research is focused on using computation techniques to understand the physics of turbulence in the environment, like that caused by marine fog, sea spray, or, in this case, hurricanes, with the hope of improving modeling and predicting techniques. Richter explained that hurricanes receive energy from warm, tropical oceans. To understand the storm, information about heat, waves, and energy transfer is needed, but when winds are blowing and waves are crashing, sending a boat or plane into the heart of the storm to gather data is dangerous. In the early 2000s, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) sponsored a campaign called CBLAST (Coupled Boundary Layers Air-Sea Transfer) to understand what’s taking place at the water’s surface. With ONR funding, Richter is continuing that work under the title SASCWATCH, but with improved technological opportunities.
“Technology has developed in such a way that now there are things that are unmanned that we can throw out there, and things that will last longer, and have a higher data collection rate.”


Richter’s team is diverse, composed of researchers from across the country at institutions including Colorado State, Colorado School of Mines, Texas A&M, University of Washington, University of Miami, Mississippi State University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the US Naval Research Laboratory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Their expertise ranges from satellites to wave properties. This hurricane season, they are deploying Black Swift aerial drones to steer toward the water’s surface in order to understand the energy transfer and the waves. The drones are launched in a canister from a “hurricane hunter” airplane as it flies through the storm at 10,000 feet. From there, the drones are remotely piloted into areas of the storm near the ocean surface to measure data such as wind speed and atmospheric flux.
The team will also deploy a number of specialized floats to create a dense map of what waves look like during a storm. They will fly the drones over those floats to collect data to understand heat and moisture transfer between the water and atmosphere.
“We want to be able to measure both at the same time. That’s the thing that has not really ever been done,” Richter said. “We’re at a stage now where we can make the type of measurements that can really push our understanding forward of how these storms work and be able to better predict where they’re going to be and how strong they’re going to be when they get there.”
How data changes evacuation planning
Understanding hurricanes is just step one. The results of Richter’s data collection can have a monumental impact on how emergency responders like Antapasis prepare communities for a storm’s landfall. Making decisions about who and when to evacuate, how to prepare, and how to allocate resources is a complex process that needs to happen quickly, Antapasis said.
“The most important part of my job is to ensure that all our departments are prepared to respond to any of these complex emergencies that we’ve seen over the last few years, and specifically hurricane situations, and ensure that our staff are trained, able to respond when needed, and when we do have to activate for an emergency, that we’re all coordinating and sharing that information and resources with each other to serve our residents and keep them safe,” Antapasis said.
He summarized: “Better information, better data, better technology ultimately is going to save more lives and make better decisions when those incidents happen.”
Hurricane-seasoned experts
Joseph Cione, the lead meteorologist for the Hurricane Research Division at NOAA and a colleague of Richter’s, has been a hurricane hunter for decades. In that time, he noted, he has seen a wide variety of storms, but last year’s Hurricane Helene, which skated over Florida before wreaking havoc on inland North Carolina, surprised even him.




Richter and Joe Cione assess plans for the deployment of Black Swift drones aboard the NOAA P-3 aircraft. In August, Richter's team worked with NOAA and the U.S. Air Force's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron before, during, and after Hurricane Erin.
“Hurricane Helene took things up another notch. Typically when we see a storm making landfall, the devastation is concentrated near the shore. In this case, it still was. However, a lot of the impacts were 200 plus miles north of where the…landfall was,” Cione explained. “This is not typically what we see, and this is something that we really need to better understand through improved observations and enhanced research.”
Cione hopes that in time, the research will allow experts to anticipate unusual storms like Helene, so they can better warn communities.
“We are here to protect property and save lives. It’s really as simple as that. That’s why our work really matters,” Cione said. “Understanding these deadly storms in as much detail as possible, even if it saves one life, is worth it.”
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I think that we have made tremendous advances over that time. And I think that we are just scratching the surface and can do a lot more, particularly with advanced types of observations that we’re using now that encompass some of the emerging technologies that NOAA and other colleagues that I work with are using.”
With hurricane season now well underway, people along the coast are hoping for a calm season. But if it’s not, Richter and his team stand ready, along with their drones and floats. They’re prepared to deploy them with the hope of improving hurricane forecasting.