Standing between hurricanes and the destruction of the state of Rhode Island is Isaac Ginis, a hurricane expert at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
Ginis received his education as an applied mathematician at the Kabardino-Balkarian State University in the former Soviet Union, where he heard a speaker deliver a lecture on typhoons in the Pacific Ocean. Inspired by this lecture, Ginis went on to earn his Ph.D. in Geophysics at the Russian Institute of Experimental Meteorology.
“After the speaker’s lecture, I asked him about how we do forecasts on typhoons and he told me that we solve mathematical equations,” Ginis said. “I thought that was a very cool application of math.”
As a Ph.D. student, Ginis focused on researching how tropical cyclones (called hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific) interact with the ocean.
“I was the first scientist to suggest that in order to predict how strong the hurricane is going to be, we need to predict the ocean temperature,” Ginis said. “I developed the coupled ocean computer model that simultaneously predicts what the hurricane does as well as how the ocean temperature changes.”
Coming to the United States with his revolutionary understanding of hurricanes and their relation to ocean temperatures, Ginis was able to help the National Weather Service implement his model and received a NOAA Environmental Hero Award for his work.
At the University of Rhode Island, Ginis focuses on developing complex computer models to better understand and predict hurricanes in the North Atlantic.
“Most people don’t know that weather research and forecasting is strongly related to actual computer science,” Ginis said. “We use what are called ‘very high performance computers.’ URI has recently invested significant funding to purchase our own computer nodes at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center to use for research.”
Today, Ginis and his students have shifted from solely focusing on theoretical meteorology to developing applied models that predict weather in real-time. Under Ginis’s leadership, researchers at the Graduate School of Oceanography started a project funded by the Department of Homeland Security to develop a forecast system for the state of Rhode Island called RI C.H.A.M.P., which stands for ‘Coastal Hazard Analysis, Modeling and Prediction’.
The system predicts coastal hazards and flooding risk during hurricanes and nor’easter storms and delivers their findings to the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency.
“I think it’s been quite an accomplishment for URI as a whole that we are able to provide this important service to the state,” Ginis said. “There’s a number of very unique features that we put into the system. As far as storm hazards, I’ve been working in collaboration with Professor Austin Becker of the Dept. of Marine Affairs.”
With this newfound knowledge on how hurricanes function, Ginis and his team have also created hypothetical hurricane scenarios and run simulations to see how a modern storm would affect Rhode Island — a departure from former simulations that only were able to run storms that had already occurred.
“We generated two scenarios and called them Hurricane Rhody and Hurricane Ram,” Ginis said. “The Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency did a training exercise based on our computer simulations, which is quite exciting.”
The work of Ginis and his researchers is proving to be ever important as the threat of climate change looms over coastal New England.
“With climate change, it’s most likely that the current hurricane season will be extended,” Ginis said. “The current official end to the hurricane season is Nov. 30, but we will probably see hurricanes in November and even December.”
Hurricanes draw energy from warm ocean waters so rapidly increasing ocean temperatures will provide hurricanes with more fuel to grow, according to Ginis.
“Ocean temperatures near Rhode Island are much lower than in the tropics, which is why we haven’t seen category four or five hurricanes here,” Ginis said. “As the ocean warms, the warm water extends more to the North, so we are seeing temperature increases near where we live.”
In the age of rapid climate change, storm damage will certainly be a force to contend with, but Isaac Ginis and his team of hurricane experts continue to adapt and prepare Rhode Island for whatever may come.