Shay: Pete, I know that you work as a meteorologist with NOAA in the Hurricane Research Division. Can you tell me briefly what you usually do in storms? What is your role in hurricane research?

Black: O.K. Each of us at the Hurricane Research Division there, we have our own specialized area of research in hurricanes. My particular area for the past five to ten years has been studying airsea interaction processes in hurricanes, designing experiments, taking measurements on how the ocean is influencing the hurricane, how the hurricane influences the ocean. Working a bit with Nick on that. It's to try to look at how the hurricane gets its energy from the ocean. I also have done a lot of work studying the wind structure in the hurricane boundary layer, the part of the hurricane close to the ground. In the late 70’s, I got involved working with satellite sensors to measure surface winds in hurricanes. We were able to take some of the instruments, that had actually been developed for satellites and redesign them for use on aircraft. We had developed, over the past few years, a number of instruments to measure surface winds in a hurricane from an airplane, and to make a lot more detailed measurements of what the vertical structure of the hurricane boundary layer looks like. The whole idea is to be able to derive that information in real time and provide it to the hurricane forecasters. My job has involved two parallel efforts: one is basic research into the boundary layer structure of the hurricane; and a parallel effort is then an applied research part to try to develop methods of getting information to the hurricane forecasters, just when we measure it, by way of a communication link, and then to develop the software and hardware necessary to digest that data back at the hurricane center, and give it to the forecasters so they can use it in their forecasts. That part of my job I found really, really nice, rewarding, I guess, might be the word, because you see an immediate payoff from the research, what you're doing in terms of perhaps, giving the forecasters greater confidence in what's going on at the surface of the hurricane, right now. It allows them to project that into the future forecast, and have a little more confidence in the forecast. That part's kind of neat. That's kind of my immediate gratification. And the long term gratification is the basic research into what makes hurricanes work. You've got to wait a long time to see the results of that.

Shay: Were you involved in any research flights with Hurricane Andrew?

Black: No. We had one experiment in Hurricane Andrew that was conducted the day before it struck Miami. But that was what we call a synoptic flow experiment, where a lot of "dropsonds", instruments that we drop from the aircraft when the aircraft flies at high levels in the environment around the hurricane, to get the environmental air flow, and to help to predict the projectory of the storm. But that was conducted by some of the other scientists in the lab. I helped on the ground, getting things going.

Shay: You had a lot of advance notice. When did you realize Andrew was heading our way, and that it might hit Miami?

Black: Well, I think. it was after that flight on the 23rd, on Saturday, when we realized that the turn to the west, that had been noted the day before, was persisting, and that the forecasts out of the National Meteorological Center of the environmental winds were showing a high pressure ridge building over the top of the storm. It just locked no way, like no way it was going to go away. So this was when the center was just approaching the Bahamas. So I was coming home, and starting to look, dig up our plywood shutters and look around frantically for nails to pound them into the walls.

Shay: What preparations did you make?

Black: At that point, all the rest of the guys in the lab were out flying, and were just getting back Saturday night, so I had to help pitch in, preparations at the lab out on the Key. We had a lot of things to do because of the head of the storm surge and everything else out there. That was the first thing I did, we had to take everybody's computer terminals, move it all to the middle of the building, cover everything in plastic, wrap everything in the office in plastic, and just hope for the best. And we had to move a bunch of equipment that I had in basement storage, up out of the basement into offices on the third floor, including a lot of the AXCP's that we use to measure ocean temperatures, that were sitting down in the basement. You know they only work in salt water, they don't work sitting in the basement.

Shay: Well, they would have been in salt water.

Black: We wouldn't have been able to measure the results from that, so I had to get them all out of the way. Then I had to run home here, board this place up. I had already cut up plywood pieces, many, many years ago when we had our addition, our carport converted to a room, we took a lot of plywood from the ceiling, at that time I made shutters. I had to go dredge them out of storage. The one thing I hadn't done though, was sink lugs into the windows, so I had to pound those things on with concrete nails. I spent the rest of the afternoon doing that.

Shay: Now, you've had a lot of experience with hurricanes from the air, what did you think it was going to be like?

Black: Well actually, it's interesting that you mention that, because the very first experience I had with a hurricane was on the ground, up in Boston, when I was a kid, let's see, I guess I was about 12 years old, when Hurricane Carol, 1964, came up over Boston and just tore the place up. It was really an awesome experience for me, and I remember thinking then, that I had to figure out what was going on with these things. So, I had that one experience, way back then, that still remains with me, like a photographic snapshot of memory. I can still remember the house shaking and trees falling down all over the place, being without electricity for about three weeks. But since then, I went to college, got all my degrees collected, came down here and worked for twenty years, and never, ever saw another hurricane on the ground. So I only had stories to go by as to what the experience would really be like. Flying in these things, I knew how violent they can be in an airplane. I just knew that it was nothing to mess with, and that you basically had to be prepared to operate in a survival type mode: be without electricity, no water, and you better be able to live on canned foods for about three weeks. I had that type of preparation, but nothing really prepared me for the actual experience. I found the experience quite exciting, fascinating to be on the ground, seeing what was happening, because it gives you... Flying in an airplane in these things, you tend to be a bit detached from what is actually happening to the people on the ground. One of the things, we've flown a few storms as they've just struck the coast. All you can think of is, "Oh, those poor people down there." But, you never really get a feeling for what they go through. Something like that is just beyond your experience to imagine, even as a scientist.

Shay: Where were you during the storm?

Black: I was here, with Claire. We camped out right here in this room. I was just keeping an eye on things as the storm progressed. This room that we added on to the side of the house, it turns out that since it was a carport, the side that was opened we filled in with concrete blocks and support pilings of concrete on the outside. So, that room actually has four concrete block walls. I figured that would be the place to go if the house started coming apart. We just camped here, keeping an eye on things. I always told Claire that if we ever did get hit by a hurricane, I'd be here at home and not at work. That was always an issue. There was a very high possibility that we'd have to be flying if a storm struck land. But, since ours is a research job and not per se a public service job, I thought I could do that. But now, the guys at the Hurricane Center didn't have that luxury. But they really had to, as a public concern, it's one of the uppermost things. And a lot of people, they were at work while their houses were being destroyed. A bunch of us, myself and a couple of other people, did go to the Hurricane Center the next day and help relieve these guys, and prepare for the second landfall when it hit Louisiana. They were still working like crazy after that. So a bunch of us who had stayed home that night, Sunday night, Monday morning, went in, and helped them, helped some of those people, so they could go home, go to what remained of their home, and take care of a few things.

Shay: That gets to my next question, what did you do right after the hurricane?

Black: Well, I'll tell you, actually there was another problem we had. Claire got real sick that night. Unrelated to the hurricane, she developed some really acute pain in the back of her neck. So I had to take her that night, the night of the storm before it hit, just around sunset, I had to take her to our family doctor. He prescribed this medication for her, actually it was a narcotic, so I went, first of all, dashed around to drug stores, to see if I could get it. They were all closed, so I went to the hospitals. They wouldn't dispense a drug like that. They decided they weren't treating anybody at that point, who wasn't in mortal danger. Anyway, she had to kind of weather the night with that condition. So the next day, the first thing I did was hop in the car and drive to Pompano Beach to a drug store there.

Shay: You had to go all the way to Pompano Beach?

Black: Yea, to find a drug store that was opened. It was weird. So, I did that, got her the medication. That helped her a lot. So then I helped a friend of mine go find a friend of theirs, who had a... she's an unmarried mother who has adopted a baby, and was living in a place down south. So, this friend of mine wanted to go down and find her, see if she was OK. So we went down, helped dig her out of the rubble.

Shay: You found her?

Black: Yea, she was just all huddled, curled up in a closet. It was a couple of hours by that time, I guess it was the middle of the morning. So anyway, we helped her out, went and found a few other friends down there. I was overwhelmed by the gradient of the damage. It was bad enough down here, I remember going outside, thinking, ‘This place looks like a moonscape.’ So to go across Kendall Drive and find, my God, every, just every single tree is knocked down. It took about an hour and a half to get down to around 140th Street. You guys live even further south than that, so I was just thinking, ‘My God, what did you guys go through?’

Shay: That's another story. You saved us a few days later, doing our laundry. You don't know how I appreciated that.

Black: I thought my first obligation was to help some of our friends who were within striking distance around here. Then I went over to the hurricane center and tried to help them out. So that turned out to be an all night, all afternoon and into the night job. After that, it was kind of a blur. For three or four days I didn't go into work, we were just helping out people around here and down south. And then it dawned on me, ‘Well somebody had better go out and try to get the big picture together here.’ We had this program for a number of years to do a damage survey of areas that were struck by a hurricane. So that you can do a survey in such a way that allows you to estimate the wind field.

Shay: So this had been done for prior hurricanes?

Black: Yea, we've done that for... let's see the very first one was Hurricane Camille in 1969. The next one after that was, I think, Hurricane Frederick in 1976, no that was 1978. We're you living in...

Shay: '78. We were in Mississippi then. We caught the tail end of it.

Black: Well, that was... We did a really big study there. So for a while there was money in the budget. It was in the budget every year, but it wasn't used every year, so the years it wasn't used people would say, "What do you need that money for?" Somebody else would take it, then a hurricane would come along and we'd have to scramble for the money to do those surveys. Finally, they said, "Look, this kind of thing, this doesn't happen often enough. Let's just forget it." Then Andrew came along and it was more important than ever to do something like that. I think that kind of a survey could have been used to help the emergency management to realize what had happened.

Shay: You were part of the panel that served on this, that did this survey. What was the goal of it? Can you tell me a little about it?

Black: Basically, this is a technique developed by my former professor at the University of Chicago, Dr. Fugita. When I was there, doing my Master's degree work in the middle 60's, he was beginning to develop these ideas about just looking, look carefully at the damage from tornados, trying to get an idea what the winds were. When I was up there, there were a couple of really devastating tornado outbreaks that just kind of... I was one of the coolies, one of the graduate students who took off to survey these tornado damage sites. We began to develop a scale, just a set of numbers like the hurricane category scale. This was a wind scale, it goes like 1 to 5, and covers a range of wind speeds 40 mph to 300 mph. After I left, he continues to develop it, up until the mid 70's. It became a pretty established technique for rating the intensity of tornados. Starting with Camille, and really getting going with Frederick and Alicia and Hugo, we applied the same technique to the hurricane damage. In areas where there were no measurements, no weather instruments survived, it turned out to be one of the only techniques, even though it was pretty subjective, of estimating the winds. It really does work pretty good. It works just like the 160 year old Beaufort scale that mariners used at sea for estimating the sea state and the wind speed at sea. Many ships still report the winds as a Beaufort number, which we can convert to wind speed. So, it's like a Beaufort number for the land, pattern recognition, it's very subjective.

Shay: But effective?

Black: But, once you have a person like Fugita, who's able to pass down the method, professor to student. Now he's got two or three students who do it real well, they're passing it on to their students. It works pretty well. That's how it started, it's continually being refined, and now since it's based on this experience, the technique still has to be refined further to take into account the cement block structures here, whereas in the MidWest most of the structures are made out of wood. So, we estimate some allowances for the different kind of construction. We can still use the tree damage and the guidelines.

Shay: So you were looking at structural damage, tree damage...

Black: Right, basically our approach was to look at the overall pattern of things. We were looking at the direction the trees fell in, the direction the debris went flying, to be able to match that up with the wind fields. You've got to derive a wind flow pattern with respect to the storm center. So, the objective is a meteorological objective, not an engineering or structural or a ..., anything having to do with evacuation plans. But now that we've worked this up, I think that this whole thing... it's very inexpensive to do it. You can do it from a single engine Cessna, high wing airplane, a couple of people in a couple of days. It only costs maybe $2000, and a couple hundred rolls of film, but...

Shay: It's very valuable information.

Black: Yea, I think that if we had the resources, the funding in place, we could use those $2000, a way we could do that the day the storm ends. Go right out and do that and relay that information, not only to the hurricane forecasters, but mainly to the emergency management people. It was three or four days, I think, before these people who are right next door to us here, really realized the impact of this storm. It could be used to help channel recovery efforts right away. In fact, we even thought, one of the analyses that we've done so far, could be composited together to get a rough idea of what the pattern looks like in a typical hurricane, and begin to plan the recovery before the hurricane even hits. You know that someone's going to get clobbered, but you might not know the details until after the fact.

Shay: Once the storm makes landfall, are there instruments to record some of these things, like the wind speed? I know you fly through them when they are over the ocean, but what happens once they do hit land?

Black: That's a problem big problem now. There are very few instruments that are ruggedized enough to withstand the very intense hurricane winds. Neither the weather service or anyone else has the money to pay for a whole network of anemometers that are strong enough to withstand 150 mph winds. But a lot of us feel that there is an instrument, a system that could be designed to sustain hurricane force winds. That maybe just gave you the peak wind during the storm, just one measurement. You could deploy these things, even from an aircraft, before the storm hit. I don't know. There are a lot of ideas going around. But it's a big, big problem. You just can't go up and down the east coast and the gulf coast instrumenting every square inch of property there with weather instruments, in the hope that sometime in the next hundred years a hurricane will go across there. The maintenance cost and the instrument cost would just be prohibitive. So, that's why we're left to work with more subjective methods. It's not so bad in a category 3 storm like Alicia which struck Houston. There were some pretty good instrument arrays already out there for air pollution purposes, and they survived the storm pretty well. But, when you go that next notch up, to a 4, nothing's going to survive. It's just a real mess, it's a big, big problem.

Shay: What did you find on the panel? There was just another article in the paper saying that the winds weren't very strong after all. Or, I've heard talk of many, many minitornados that caused this damage. Basically, what did your panel find?

Black: Well, as you mention, there's many approaches, many different approaches that were taken to try to derive what the wind field was, given the fact that you had virtually no measurement. We had just a few estimates from people with anemometers of their own, and that sort of thing. Different people, using different methods, have come to different conclusions. The engineers look at the tensile strength of the materials that were used to build the buildings here, and have concluded that they break apart at one particular set of wind speeds. Our approach has been to take the, to compare the damage, types of damage that occur from tornados, and to see how those kinds of damage patterns compare with hurricane. So anyway, what we have concluded is that there were really two major areas of intense wind. One, kind of right along, between 184th Street, where you live, and about 152nd. That was the center of the strongest winds, and the leading edge of the eye wall, the area of very intense winds around the eye. But the other thing we found was that area, further south around Naranja Lakes, where there was just an incredibly devastated region. It was caused by the wind on the back side of the hurricane. We have never really seen that magnitude of damage caused by the back side of the storm. Mostly, just about every storm we've seen has been the right hand side of the storm. Just one other storm in Texas, Cecelia, 1973, that had the major damage on the left side, the rear side, the hack side. Andrew seemed to be a case like that. In that area, there seemed to be evidence for a number of damage swathes. Well defined swathes, maybe several hundred yards long, maybe 40, 50 yards wide, that seem to... the really fine detail and the damage pattern that we saw, from photographs that were taken just a couple days after the storm, suggested that there were little miniswirls or, they were a smaller scale than tornados, but their rotational speeds, maybe of 50 - 60 mph, but added on to the hurricane force winds, it appeared to us from the damage that was done there, the actual peak magnitudes were close to 200 mph in these very narrow swathes. So, one conclusion right now is that there were a series of these small little whirl winds that were embedded in the basic flow that traveled over some areas of South Dade County. One happened to occur there in Naranja Lakes, there's another area around 200th Street and 87th Avenue, through Kendall Pines area, no that's Whispering Pines. There was an apartment, an old age home area, a complex of HUD manufactured buildings there who experienced damage due to that. A number of these wind streaks that had kind of been noted before in other surveys, like the Cecelia case, that's the previous one, I think there were some in Frederick also, but never on a scale like we saw here. So, since then, since we've found that, we've been trying to figure out, "what is the physical mechanism that could have produced those kind of things?" That led me to look more carefully at same of the radar data that we recorded from the Miami radar till the time it was destroyed, and then we had a second beam in Tampa, recorded from Tampa radar, even though it was at a longer range, we were still able to look carefully at these intense convector cells in the eye wall. One of the things we noticed was that they seemed, to develop right along the coast at about, around 164th Street, in that area between 184th and 152nd, rotate around the eye wall to the southwest, and actually seemed to form a smaller mesoscale circulation right at the edge of the eye wall.) That further intensified, locally intensified the wind field at the edge of the eye, which is already a dangerous area anyway. So, we still don't know what the link, what the direct link is between this small scale mesocycle and the smaller little whirl winds. It's the kind of connection that's been documented in tornados. One of the things I looked at in my Master's thesis, in fact, when I worked with Fugita, was the connection between the path of the tornado, with the thunder storms, and what they call the mesocylone, or the tornado cyclone, is associated with the thunder storm, where actually the whole thunder storm starts rotating. That produces a tornado, one particular segment of this rotating thunder storm. And then within the tornado, there are even smaller whirls, called at that time suction vortices, that rotate about at the core of the tornado vortex, and it's those lift miniature little vortices, within the tornado that cause the real devastating damage.

Shay: Did the panel have any recommendations based on the information you found?

Black: We've just finished writing a little paper for our meteorology journals to summarize the result of the wind field analysis. But as far as recommendations for what ought to be done in the future, I think those two things I mentioned before. The one thing is a real strong recommendation, that a fund be set aside that doesn’t go away at the end of the fiscal year, that if there’s a landfalling hurricane or two landfalling hurricanes, there are funds available to do this kind of survey right away, no matter where in the country it is. And then set up a communications system involving one of these GIS, Geographical Information Systems, on the PC or a minicomputer to input this information on a computer database, feed it in real time to the emergency management people, so that they can use it for assessing where the worst damaged areas are. That was one thing. The second thing was to try to come up with a, it was recommended anyway, to come up with some design for a cheap, ruggedized measurement system that could be put in place ahead of the storm. That's probably going to, I mean, that's more of a wish than something we can imagine happening really soon. But, I think T could imagine, if there was proper public support, putting this funding back, the kind of a meteorological survey we do now, that doesn't mean there's not a need for other types of survey, by the engineers and other people. I think, we felt that top priority ought to be given to doing this kind of a survey from a meteorological perspective, to try to get a handle right away an where the heaviest damage is and what the likely high winds were.

Shay: Your whole office deals in hurricane research. You mentioned the day before the storm you were moving computers to the center of the room, preparing things there. Has your office as a whole, made any provisions for future storms?

Black: No, I can't say as they have. You know, we're in a pretty vulnerable situation out there. In fact our, the most vulnerable thing is the fact that we have a database archive from the past 25 years of hurricane flights sitting out there. If they got soaked or ruined, it would be a tragedy as far as hurricane research goes. That's another one of those things, that right now there just doesn't seem to be money available or people resources to devote to the problem. With all the new technologies for archiving data, such as the optical discs, CD's, all these new media, that really should be done. What needs to be done are the plans set up to transfer all that data onto these new systems, and archive this data in a location that's not quite so vulnerable. But as far as doing anything different in the future, not that there is anything like that being done, even for us doing research in hurricanes,

Shay: It's now almost eight months after the storm. Have things progressed the way you thought they would?

Black: In what sense, do you mean as far as recovery goes, or as far as our research?

Shay: The recovery, what you found thus far?

Black: Well, it's pretty surprising to me how slow things have been to rebound. It shows the immensity of the devastation that occurred I think. Psychologically, it's taken a humongous toll on people. It's such an overwhelming problem. It's like people have so many things to juggle now, it's an overload an the systems. You get to the point where you don't know what to do next. I even feel that way, because what Andrew did for us professionally was inject this huge research project intro the middle of everything else. This was not planned for, so it's like, "OK, you do this, but you make sure you do everything else that you are supposed to do, also. Just do everything at once." It's the sort of feeling I get at work. And after that, all the other little things. Oh it's just... We have not nearly been as effected as you and others down south. It's just the sheer magnitude of work around the house, that even adding that on top of all your other responsibilities. It just creates a kind of an overload situation, frazzles nerves.) One thing that may came out of this is that it has stimulated us t6 put together a new research plan for hurricane research that would emphasize the whole idea of including a full quality forecast to pinpoint where these storms are going to go further in advance, and how intense they might be in advance. First of all, the warning, the areas warned could be more focused, and it won't asp impossible a job to have to evacuate half the east coast, maybe you only have to evacuate a couple hundred miles. Try to work an reducing the cost related to a hurricane making landfall. Bo, that's in the system now. We'll have to wait and see. A lot of people trend to get a little pessimistic about the outlook an something like that because as far as the rest of the country goes, "Well, Andrew is aver and done with. It hit in August; this is April now. Everything just ought to be back to normal. It's just over and done with and lets get on with business. Get a life." You know. So you wonder how it's going to, in the overall scheme of things. Whether, Andrew will really provide enough conscience raising, among politicians, to provide a new influx into research efforts. I don't really know if it effects the budget. But anyway, it got people's attention far a while.