Souped-up satellites, supercomputers, and superior science might soon mean you really can trust the weather report. Weather forecasters predicted Hurricane Katrina's path with nearly complete accuracy two-and-a-half days before the hurricane struck; the forecast of Hurricane Rita just a month later was more wrong than right. But new satellites, many launched this spring, along with new computers, international collaboration, and a better understanding of the science of weather are poised to make hurricanes and other extreme weather events reliably predictable five or six days in advance.
The August issue of IEEE Spectrum covers these developments just in time for hurricane season. Projects discussed include the World Meteorological Organization's Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (Thorpex), the U.S. and Taiwan's Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (Cosmic), NASA's CloudSat satellite, NASA and CNES's Calipso satellite, and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (Geoss).
