Located in a landlocked town about 5,000 feet above sea level and an hour’s drive from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Colorado State University is often subject to freezing temperatures and snowy winters.
But it’s certainly never taken a direct hit from a hurricane.
Yet ahead of each Atlantic hurricane season for the last 40 years, researchers at CSU have issued painstakingly detailed forecasts for the coming months, predicting everything from the number and intensity of hurricanes that will form to where exactly they might hit land.
The university issued its first — and really the first ever — seasonal forecast in 1984. Since then, its comprehensive seasonal predictions have garnered global recognition, becoming synonymous with those issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other climate agencies around the world. It’s a trusted source that Louisianans look to each spring while mentally preparing for the upcoming season.
“It is a bit of a head scratcher if you’re just sort of the average layperson and you’re reading these headlines about, ‘Colorado State? Hurricanes?'” said Paul Miller, an associate professor of coastal sciences at LSU. “Shouldn’t they do mountains or blizzards or something?”
But Miller said the renown is well-deserved. Boasting a top-rated, 61-year-old atmospheric science department with research areas ranging from cloud microphysics to machine learning, Miller said CSU’s credibility in the meteorology world goes far beyond hurricane forecasting.
Among the general public, though, it’s hurricanes that have made CSU famous. That’s largely thanks to one scientist, late professor William Gray, who Miller described as “the pioneer” of seasonal hurricane forecasting.
All these years later, Miller said CSU’s forecasts are heralded as a benchmark for others in the field. Miller’s team at LSU recently launched an annual seasonal forecast specific to the Gulf, and they often look to CSU’s broader Atlantic predictions for comparison.
“If we can hang with Colorado State, we’re feeling pretty good about it,” he said.
A pioneer of forecasting
Gray wasn’t the first person to analyze the many large-scale environmental factors that fuel tropical cyclones, and he wasn’t the first to attempt to predict how much tropical activity a season would bring.
“But he was really the first person to take it, run with it and then turn it into a publicly disseminated forecast,” Miller said.
CSU issued its first forecast, authored by Gray, 14 years before NOAA’s first came out in 1998.
Seasonal predictions are par for the course now, but CSU hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said that before Gray came along, hurricanes were lumped in with other weather events — and you can’t forecast most weather six months ahead of time.
Phil Klotzbach and Bill Gray in 2005.
This, of course, was long before computer models and satellite imaging changed the game forever.
Meteorology in general is still a relatively new field. Klotzbach said weather forecasting gained prominence during World War II, when the predictions were used to help forces on both sides better plan for attacks. D-Day in particular, when forecasters with the Allied forces predicted a break in bad weather that allowed for the surprise invasion of France, is often cited as a pivotal moment in meteorological history.
While there’s still disagreement among experts about how large a role the forecast played in that critical battle, Klotzbach said it got people’s attention, sparking interest among younger generations, including people like Gray.
Shortly after graduating from college in 1952, Gray served as a weather forecast officer in the Air Force and later joined renowned hurricane researcher Herbert Riehl at the newly formed Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU in 1961.
It was another two decades before Gray would issue his first seasonal hurricane forecast, by which time Gray had made a name for himself in the field. By then, Klotzbach said he didn’t care much what his peers thought about attempts to forecast tropical activity.
“He already had a fair amount of street cred by that point,” Klotzbach said. “He didn’t really have fear.”
Phil Klotzbach
Gray’s fingerprints all over the hurricane world stretch well beyond the seasonal forecasts. He’s credited with identifying the connection between El Niño and lower hurricane activity in the Atlantic, and he advised 70 master’s and Ph.D. students over his long academic career, many of whom, including Klotzbach, went on to become titans in tropical meteorology research.
But, Klotzbach said, Gray and CSU are best known for the seasonal forecast — “for better or worse.”
‘Storm surge can’t get you at 5,000 feet’
CSU researchers study storms in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and Klotzbach said Gray used to joke that Colorado was splitting the difference. Plus, as Gray used to say, “the storm surge can’t get you at 5,000 feet.”
But in reality, satellites and other tools have made it possible to study storms without going out into the field, according to Eric Maloney, a CSU professor and head of the Department of Atmospheric Science.
Researchers at work in CSU’s hurricane lab.
“A lot of the study of tropical meteorology occurs with tools where you don’t necessarily need to be in the tropics,” Maloney said, though he added that researchers like to get out in the field whenever possible. Maloney himself has been out on research trips in the Maldives and Costa Rica.
But to Maloney, it’s not that strange that a school in a landlocked state is among the leading hurricane researchers. When it comes to the weather and climate, it’s ultimately all connected.
Hurricanes might not directly impact Colorado, but landlocked states feel the effects of the tropics on a larger scale. That’s partly why CSU’s roughly 200 atmospheric science faculty and students study such a broad range of issues.
“It forges a lot of interesting collaborations at the intersection of weather and climate and air quality,” he said.