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Health & Fitness

Getting Public To Believe Hurricane Forecasts Focus of Talk By Purchase College, SUNY Professor

Purchase, NY (September 9, 2013) -- How to get the public to take hurricane warnings issued by authorities and weather forecasters seriously, and to realize global climate change will impact the way we look at hurricane threats in the future—that will be the focus of a lecture at Purchase College, SUNY on September 17 by Joel Tenenbaum, research professor of meteorology and scientific computing at Purchase.

The literal peak of the hurricane season in this area is September 10.  With that date and Hurricane Sandy still fresh in the minds of New York area residents, Tenenbaum will deliver a talk entitled “Wolf, Wolf? Hurricane Sandy, Weather Forecasting and Global Climate Change.”   The lecture, free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. in Room 1001 in Purchase College’s Natural Sciences Building.

“Hurricane Sandy was a human tragedy and a technical failure,” Tenenbaum says. “How in an era of live television reports of rising water at Battery Park City in Manhattan do we get vulnerable Staten Islanders to actually act and seek higher ground?”

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“How in an era of NASA Sky Cranes delivering the Curiosity rover to Mars do we put fuel for hospital emergency power supplies in the basement and not have corks for tunnels,” Tenenbaum asks.

Tenenbaum says that the relationships between warnings, weather forecasts and the controversy over global climate change are all important to examine “to see how missteps from last year can be avoided the next time and the many times after that.”

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While at Purchase, Tenenbaum also has been principal investigator on a NASA meteorological Research Grant from 1975 to 2008 and currently collaborates with the United Kingdom Meteorological Office on the use of aircraft observations to verify their automated forecasts of clear air turbulence.

About Purchase College, SUNY:  Purchase College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) network of 64 universities and colleges, was founded in 1967 by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His aspirations for Purchase were to combine on one campus conservatory training in the visual and performing arts with programs in the liberal arts and sciences. Today, Purchase College–SUNY is a community of students, faculty, and friends where open-minded engagement with the creative process leads to a lifetime of intellectual growth and professional opportunity. For more information about the College, visit www.purchase.edu




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