Examining Hurricane Milton’s Milestones with NASA's GES DISC Datasets

In early October 2024, a tropical low-pressure system formed in the Gulf of Mexico, just west of the Yucatan Peninsula, subsequently intensifying at an unprecedented rate into a Category 5 hurricane. This fierce system, Milton, was immediately recognized as a serious threat to the state of Florida. Evacuations and landfall just south of the entrance to Tampa Bay ultimately reduced Milton’s impact, but the storm still brought record rainfall totals and destructive winds and triggered dozens of tornadoes across the state. This webinar utilizes several datasets available at NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), including data from the cutting-edge Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) Mission along with Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2), and Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) datasets to investigate the factors that made Milton a remarkable, record-setting hurricane. A Jupyter Notebook demonstration shows you how to access and visualize the datasets used in the webinar with the earthaccess Python library. Presentation slide deck: https://go.nasa.gov/4ggkHSp Chapters 0:00 Introduction/Logistics 04:49 Overview of Hurricane Milton's Milestones 06:26 Hurricane Milton Use Case 10:46 Evaluating the Environment for Milton's Intensification 13:24 TROPICS Mission Overview 17:05 Using TROPICS Data to Look at Cyclogenesis of Milton 22:18 Evaluating Runoff and Streamflow after Milton with NLDAS Data 26:47 Jupyter Notebook Python Analysis 29:15 What are Data Processing Levels? 36:50 Overview of Workflow: Jupyter Notebook 40:23 Google Colab Demo (Earthdata Search, OPeNDAP, earthaccess) 1:01:36 Conclusions/Wrap-Up 1:03:35 More Information and Documentation 1:04:36 Question-and-Answer Period