 Hurricane workshop to meet in Bay Area
National Science Board to take look at recovery
When the President of the United States has to decide a scientific issue, he rings up the National Science Foundation to get the facts.
Some of those facts will be collected Tuesday in Pensacola when the National Science Board -- whose 24 members govern the foundation -- conducts a Hurricane Science and Engineering Task Force Workshop at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition.
It will be the third such workshop since fall. The others were in Arlington, Va., and Boulder, Colo.
Pensacola will give the experts a firsthand look at how a community recovers from hurricane devastation, said Ken Ford, chief executive officer of the institute and a National Science Board member. "Coastal communities will always bear the brunt of hurricanes and tropical storms," he said. "Our hope is that through science and engineering, we can find ways to minimize the loss of life and damage to homes and businesses."
Whispers of weather modification
Ford expects that the series of meetings will yield new directions for hurricane-related research that may lead to advances such as better forecasting of the anticipated damage at landfall, more effective damage mitigation, and improved response and recovery.
There even could be whispers of weather modification in the discussion, said Kelvin Droegemeier, a meteorology professor at University of Oklahoma and co-chairman at the workshop with Ford.
Droegemeier said they have the capabilities to cause rain with "cloud seeding," or to divert a hurricane by placing a biological film over warm water, but then more problems could arise.
"It can hurt neighboring areas and bring up ethical issues," he said. "When you start mucking around with the physics of the atmosphere and the physics of human beings, you never know what you're going to get."
The main focus of the workshop is not as titillating, but just as important.
Every scientific discipline can converge because all apply in a hurricane, Droegemeier said.
A hurricane represents everything in science, from atmosphere, coastal environment, engineering of buildings and levees, social sciences to Internet breakdowns and use of robotics in toxic, hard-to-access places. "Let's take the hurricane and open the doors," Droegemeier said.
The institute in Pensacola was established by the Florida Legislature in 2003 as a statewide, nonprofit research institute of the State University System of Florida. It is one of the nation's premier research organizations with world-class scientists and engineers. "This could generate a lot of research about hurricanes and hurricane mitigation, their socioeconomic and psychological impact -- the types of things I think we all have firsthand experience with," said Julie Sheppard, the institute's attorney. "It's a big deal."
A final report by the task force is expected to be released in September to President Bush, Congress and the public
Source: Pensacola News Journal
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