Meet Dr. William Gray, Hurricane Forecaster
I met Dr. William Gray when he was in New Orleans for the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in January 2008. While we were walking along the infamous site of the 17th Street Canal levee break in Lakeview, a tour bus stopped to point him out. He waved, getting quite a chuckle out of his renown here along the Gulf South for his yearly seasonal hurricane outlooks. In Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives and does his research, he was always known as the Mayor’s husband. His wife Nancy (now deceased) was the one people were stopping to greet.
He wanted to be famous when he was young, but for slinging a baseball. “I wanted to be a pitcher,” Gray said.
His baseball dreams stunted by a knee injury, Gray graduated from George Washington University with a degree in geography. He was working on his masters when World War II intervened. Like other meteorologists of his generation, he was trained to forecast weather during the war. Gray was stationed in the middle of the Atlantic on the Azores, an island chain 900 miles off the coast of Portugal, providing forecasts for the Trans-Atlantic flights. At that time, there were no satellites and no computers. “I got a lot of good weather experience.”
At the end of the war, Gray decided to continue his career in meteorology under the tutelage of Dr. Herbert Riehl in Chicago, whom Gray calls the most prominent tropical meteorologist of his time. “The new National Hurricane Research Project had just been formed,” and so in 1958, Riehl and Gray began flying into the center of hurricanes. Dr. Gray wrote his Master/PhD thesis from the flight data gathered during these flights into the center of the storms, describing the internal structure of these storms.
In 1961, Dr. Herbert Riehl moved to Chicago, and offered Gray a job in his department at Colorado State University. Still based far from hurricane country, Gray began spending every summer in Florida, chasing hurricanes. But, there was one big problem. “We would go to Florida every year and wonder was this going to be an active season?”
Dr. Gray states the Atlantic Ocean Basin has the largest year to year variability when it comes to tropical cyclones. “Some years there just weren’t many storms, other years a whole lot of storms and the question is we couldn’t tell before the season. It was completely random.” Gray told me.
In the early part of the 1980s, after Dr. Gray had been flying into storms for 3 decades, he noticed a parallel between two data sets he had collected: the formation of El Nino in the Pacific Ocean and the lack of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean Basin. During an El Nino year, there would be less tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic Ocean. The term El Nino refers to the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. For years, it’s mainly been the bane of the Western United States, because it can lead to flooding rains and mudslides. But, in the Atlantic, it leads to wind shear, and wind shear is bad for hurricanes. (Wind shear is a change in wind direction or speed with height.)
When Dr. Gray made the discovery back in the 1980s, it didn’t receive much attention because there weren’t very many storms. But in the last 15 years, the Southeastern United States has been hit by one devastating storm after another. And populations across the Eastern United States and Gulf of Mexico began waiting for his predictions and whether it spelled another active year, or a relatively quiet season. Nowadays, most of his research is done by Dr. Phil Klotzbach, the main author on the seasonal outlooks. Their research and outlook forecasts are much more complicated, based on worldwide weather patterns, and ocean temperatures around the globe.
And, he’s got competition. Forecasters at North Carolina State, the Weather Research Center in Houston, and European forecasters all put out a seasonal hurricane forecast, among others.
However, the official hurricane outlook published by NOAA at the beginning of hurricane season still most resembles the forecast parameters discovered by Dr. Gray.