Hurricane Maria approaching Puerto Rico on September 19, 2017. Image by Tim Loomis, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellites group.

Solving climate's toughest questions, one challenge at a time

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April 30, 2020

From Sept. 17-18, 2017, Hurricane Maria grew from a Category 1 storm to what the National Weather Service called an “extremely dangerous” Category 5. Two days later, it slammed into Puerto Rico as a strong Category 4, killing an estimated 2,975 people and causing $90 billion in damage in Puerto Rico alone. 

Hurricanes like Maria demonstrate the immense importance of predicting weather and climate patterns in the short, medium and long term, but key weaknesses in weather and climate models make foreseeing such events difficult. 

Jialin Lin, associate professor of geography, has spent the last two decades tackling those challenges, and in the past two years, he’s had breakthroughs in answering two of forecasting’s most pernicious questions: predicting the shift between El Niño and La Niña and predicting which hurricanes will rapidly intensify.

Now, he’s turning his attention to creating more accurate models predicting global warming and its impacts, leading an international team of 40 climate experts to create a new book identifying the highest-priority research questions for the next 30-50 years. The book, Current Frontiers in Climate and Weather Research, is expected to release in late 2021. 

“We are at a tipping point,” Lin said. “In the last 50 years, we have set up the observation network, we have made advancements in climate modeling…and we have all the satellites and weather balloons flying in the air. We have such a powerful system, but we still cannot predict these disasters.”

Solving climate's toughest questions, one challenge at a time