You wouldn’t know it from watching him on South Beach in the middle of winter, smiling into the teeth of a cold forty-knot wind, but Jim Edson is a serious scientist. He is trained in meteorology. The research he is doing on Martha’s Vineyard is the first ever into a hurricane’s intensity – how to predict how strong a storm will be when it hits land. Right now, Edson says, we are clueless about why a storm strengthens – or weakens – when it approaches the shore.

Along the whole North American coastline, one of the most promising places to do this research is on the Atlantic waters just off South Beach. Here, on a tower arrayed with scientific instruments two miles due south of Edgartown Great Pond, Edson has been hunting for clues that he hopes one day will allow meteorologists to predict how strong a storm will be when it strikes land.

“Right now we have zero skill,” says Edson, who recently left the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to take a job as professor of physics at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. “We really can’t say with much certainty, if you’ve got a Category 5 hurricane out in the ocean, what’s it going to be when it makes landfall here. That’s what we’re working towards.”

For a moment this summer, there were clouds over the project. Two years ago, Edson felt confident that Washington would fund the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory with a grant from the National Science Foundation, taking over from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Navy. But the funding didn’t come through, and the observatory was in danger of shutting down.

That would be a loss not only to the scientific community but also to the millions of Americans who live along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. If hurricane forecasters must continue to guess at a storm’s intensity as it makes landfall, they will often get it wrong. As a result, homeowners, college kids, and daredevils will continue to ride out the storms in places they have no business being. They just don’t believe the forecasts.

Hurricane Lili was a perfect example.

On the night of October 3, 2002, the huge eye of Lili was bearing down on the Louisiana Gulf Coast town of Lafayette. Its massive size was matched by its winds: 145 miles an hour. A Category 4 hurricane. A guaranteed killer. Many families heeded the warnings of the National Hurricane Center and local authorities. They jammed the roads north. But others stayed.

By 8 a.m. the next day, Lili had reached Lafayette, but not as a Category 4 hurricane. In six hours, it had dropped to a Category 2, scratching ashore less like a monster and more like a mouse. The college kids laughed and whooped it up in the streets. That time, they were right.

“There are researchers who are using that storm as a case study,” says Jim Edson, who remains an adjunct scientist at Woods Hole. “They’re seeing that it made a difference if you included the ocean surface in your model forecast.”

Edson suspects that two things may cause abrupt changes in the intensity of a storm as it makes landfall, both of them to do with the water over which it travels, and from the heat and moisture on which it feeds: ocean current and roughness of the surface. These are two areas of Edson’s research on the Vineyard.

“Usually when you think of roughness of the sea surface, when you look out on the ocean, it’s waves. The winds themselves are generating these wave fields and their increasing roughness. The rougher the surface, the more brakes are being put on the storm.

“You can imagine if you’ve got a nice smooth surface – that’s the best surface for the wind blowing over it: very smooth, very little friction, and so there’s actually what we call very little drag on that interface. As soon as you start adding bumps – that’s what the waves are – you start to have more drag on the surface. And that is what’s putting the brakes on the storm.”

But Edson says that until researchers figure out this dynamic, forecasters will continue to miss-predict the power of the hurricanes. So their credibility will fall and homeowners and college kids will defy the storms. It’s a dangerous mix and lends urgency to Edson’s studies.

On this chilly January afternoon, the sun glistens off the wavetops beyond South Beach, but the Atlantic does not look warm. It’s turned that dark indigo blue of New England winter water. Jim Edson is standing on the wind-scraped sand near the end of Herring Creek Road at Katama. He wears a goofy wool-knit cap with earflaps, decorated with marching caribou. The wind gusts, lifting both flaps, giving his head the appearance of a bird about to lift off. He pulls the ties to the flaps and knots them beneath his chin. All the while, he’s smiling like a kid with a new toy.

“This is something that I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. He got the weather bug in high school. He worked on a summer program measuring wind and waves on Long Island Sound under the tutelage of legendary weatherman Dr. Mel Goldstein.

He points to a white, twenty-foot-tall mast with sensors on it, just in back of the South Beach dunes, located near the old Donnelly house at the intersection of Herring Creek Road and Atlantic Drive. This meteorological mast (or met-mast to the scientists who work on it), set up in 2000, was the first important component of the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory, which measures the exchange of carbon dioxide between sea and air, as well as the nature and power of oncoming tropical storms.

“We’ve built this nice tower on land, and it works really well when the wind is onshore. Here, the Vineyard is southward facing and the predominant wind directions are southwest, so that’s great,” Edson says. An unsheltered south-facing shoreline, in which wind and waves line up so often and so well, is a unique place to set up an observatory and capture the data Edson needs to understand what happens to a hurricane approaching the shallows along a coastline.

“For the most part, we’re getting really great data from that land-based measurement. The instruments on the mast on the beach are up high enough so they’re not being disturbed by the dunes when the flow is onshore. Those sensors are measuring the heat, mass, and moisture exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere directly.”

But for his research into the mechanics of approaching hurricanes, Edson needed measurements from the place where the storms gather their strength, out in the ocean. So that’s where Woods Hole put the offshore tower in 2002 – two miles out to sea, and just a little to the west.

Standing on three legs, within sight of the beach at the end of Herring Creek Road, the tower supports sensors from the sea floor, fifty feet below, to the top of the observatory, seventy-six feet above the surface. “We have a very similar set of sensors out on that tower, which allows us to extend our investigations to measure flows that are both onshore and offshore,” Edson says. 

Below the surface and on the bottom, there are sensors measuring waves, currents, temperature, and salinity – “the whole nine yards, so we can do correlation studies between the momentum and heat exchange and what the ocean’s response is.” The data from the ocean tower flow through a cable buried deep beneath the beach back to a shack at the Katama Airfield, about a mile inland. From there, the data run day and night to Woods Hole, and to Edson’s computer in Connecticut. Edson models the interaction between wind and waves, which line up so well here in the prevailing southwesterly breezes, to get an accurate prediction of the wave field, one of the crucial parts of making an accurate forecast.

The Vineyard is ideal for Edson’s research for historic reasons too. Residents well know that the Island has been smacked by big storms over the years: the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, the Hurricane of 1944, Carol and Edna in 1954, and Bob on August 19, 1991.

“It’s so severe, the climatology out there. We had to design the tower to survive our winters; it should survive a Category 3 hurricane (winds up to 130 miles per hour), and we’re going to take advantage of it. We’re going to keep it running all year round, and hope we get run over occasionally by these storms.”

Right there is where the hopes of scientist Jim Edson and the hopes of the rest of us on the Vineyard diverge. As soon as he says he hopes we get run over by a big storm, he looks up.

“Now I want to make this clear,” he adds sheepishly. “I don’t like hurricanes. I was here for Hurricane Bob when I first got to Woods Hole, and it really made a mess of things here on the Cape and Islands. But if it’s going to run us over, we’d like to be ready to take the measurements.

 “It’s just so darned hard to measure within a hurricane. Boats don’t steam into hurricanes. They get the heck out of the way. Aircraft do fly into hurricanes, but at such heights they aren’t measuring directly what the exchange of energy is between the ocean and the atmosphere where it really matters, down near the surface. That’s the goal of this research – to figure out ways to take measurements near the ocean surface in these really harsh conditions.”

With this information, Edson will get a better understanding of how the energy from the ocean surface gets up into the air, into the hurricane. Also, how the hurricane itself affects the ocean as it passes over. That, he explains, could strengthen the storm, or put the brakes on it. There’s more stuff he’d like to put on the tower.

“We’d like to add direct measurement of the sea-spray concentration and then link that to what we’re seeing in the energy exchange and the momentum exchange. That will take wind sensors capable of surviving sixty-knot winds, because I’m not quite sure the ones I have out there now can handle that, and devices that can measure sea spray and the moisture at those high winds. It’s those three elements that I’d like to focus on for instrument development.”
Sea spray is the most exciting part of Edson’s research. He describes the sea surface under the storm as being like a washing machine. The sea spray acts like a lubricant on the surface, making it slippery. It’s only a theory right now, but Edson thinks sea spray might be the culprit behind a storm suddenly zooming up in strength. “There is speculation that it might be sea spray because you’re injecting all this moisture into the air and maybe that is a more efficient means of getting energy into the storm.”

At the moment, hurricane forecasters get high marks for knowing where the storm is headed. But they do less well when it comes to telling us how strong it will be when it hits – though that doesn’t stop them from making predictions.

The research at the observatory has already yielded enormous amounts of important data. Edson had hoped he would have solid answers on predicting hurricane intensity within three years.

“We have the potential right now to make a huge advance, I believe. We’ve got the tower, we’ve got sensors that we hope will survive the passage of a hurricane. And once we start to collect under those conditions, we will start to make significant advances.”

Earlier this year, Edson feared that the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory might be shut down. Washington wants to cut non-military spending, and one of the areas under scrutiny is scientific research. But Edson and his colleagues met with officials at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which agreed to fund the observatory into 2007. The meteorological mast at South Beach and the tower off Edgartown Great Pond will keep waiting for the inevitable, unwanted, perfect tropical storm.