Turning the tide: URI professor’s research stays current

Professor Issac Ginis, has developed an accurate model to predict hurricane intensity adopted by the National Weather Service. PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Pierson | Contributing Photographer

Hurricanes pose one of the biggest natural threats to many people, and University of Rhode Island professor Isaac Ginis has helped the world understand the threats that they pose.

Ginis is the creator of a computer model used by the National Weather Service that uses ocean temperature to predict the severity of a hurricane. The model was the first one to have a major focus on how the ocean affects the destructive strength of a hurricane.

Ginis is primarily focused on improving models to predict the impacts of hurricanes on local coastal communities today with the Rhode Island Coastal Hazards, Analysis, Modeling and Prediction (RI-CHAMP) system. He and his team have also received National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funding to look at the effects of extreme weather and sea level rise with his current models to predict future hurricane damage and areas at risk in New England.

Ginis grew up in Ukraine, a country well out of the path of hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. However, the country was at the time a part of the Soviet Union, and a visiting professor gave a guest lecture in one of Ginis’s classes about typhoons on Russia’s east coast. Ginis, who was a math student at the time, was almost instantly interested in these storms and realized how his expertise could fit into hurricane research.

“A computer model is essentially a set of mathematical equations,” Ginis said. “And the first thing is essentially to put together this equation that would describe all of the physical processes.”

When he came to the U.S. in 1990, Ginis’s initial struggles were mainly due to one thing— the lack of research on the relationship between hurricanes and the ocean in the country at the time.

“People don’t think that much about the ocean below,” Ginis said. “They focus on the physics of the atmosphere and how it affects hurricane intensity. That was the research focus for many years.”

After arriving in the U.S., Ginis worked at Princeton University, where he developed “ocean coupling,” which is a combination of his ocean model to his fellow scientists’ hurricane prediction models. After his time at Princeton, Ginis came to URI in 1993 and started to make presentations about his findings.

Two of Ginis’s major findings about how to predict a hurricane’s strength involved researching how ocean temperatures cooled down, which subsequently weakens hurricanes, through buoys used for observation. 

According to him, the first reason for cooling ocean temperatures in a hurricane is due to the evaporation of ocean water, which is an energy source for hurricanes. What Ginis said was more important, and the main reason why the ocean cools, however, is due to currents generated by the wind of a hurricane, which brings cooler waters to the ocean’s surface. 

According to Ginis, many fellow scientists were doubtful of his model when he pitched it to the National Weather Service, but its success changed minds and led to partial implementation of its model before being fully implemented after a few years.

“We started to do simulations in real-time for all the storms in the Atlantic, and at the end of hurricane season, it turned out that our model improved intensity predictions by 25 percent,” Ginis said. “Usually, intensity predictions improve a few percent.”

In order to better prepare coastal communities for risk, Ginis has worked on the RI-CHAMP program, which maps critical infrastructure in the communities that Ginis has worked with, including Charlestown and multiple communities on Cape Cod.

While Rhode Islanders remember the Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol, two of the most destructive hurricanes in the state’s history, as bad, Ginis said that a similar hurricane today would be even more destructive.

“What we’re seeing recently with hurricanes making landfall in the U.S., they have a tendency to slow down after making landfall,” Ginis said. “So we need to be prepared that in New England we’ll have a storm that would make landfall and then slow down and for maybe a day or so producing enormous rainfall.”

To model that, Ginis and his team created two hypothetical hurricanes — Hurricane Rhody and Hurricane Ram. The two are the first non-historical storms to be used in training exercises for local emergency services.

URI’s Emergency Management Director, Sam Adams, works with Ginis both in his professional role and as a Ph.D. student working on the RI-CHAMP program.

“I really appreciate just how unique Dr. Ginis’s program is and what they put together,” he said. “There’s really nothing else quite like it in terms of the resolution and the level of detail that it presents.”

The RI-CHAMP program was able to get its first live test when Tropical Storm Henri hit southern Rhode Island in 2021. While not as powerful as originally forecast, the storm still affected the state and provided the first real test of the program.

According to Ginis, his team was in contact with the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency (RIEMA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the storm, measuring it with the model.

“We were able to communicate with FEMA, and they found it very much useful,” Ginis said. “They are very much looking forward to getting this done and making this an operational policy system.”

Adams said that the critical infrastructure on the URI Kingston campus itself is at very little risk of non-wind related hurricane damage, and while the URI Bay Campus is at risk of a storm surge, the RI-CHAMP program showed less risk than he initially thought.

Regardless of the risk to the campus itself, Ginis’s work on models has been unique, and Adams said that the URI community is better for it.

“Knowing that we have this as a resource in our own backyard that we’ve been able to actually use here at URI to keep our community safer has been really exciting to be a part of,” Adams said. “And I’m very thankful to Dr. Ginis for having put all this stuff together and making it happen.”