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Gensini says the average Illinois citizen might not change his
behavior due to a long-range forecast, but the information could
be valuable for many others.
If you were the Illinois Emergency Management Agency or an
insurance company
you could move assets, you could begin to
try to mitigate against the potential risks, Gensini said. If
I were able to tell [farmers] three weeks from now that there is
an enhanced potential of significant rain and flooding, that may
alter a decision on when to plant crops this year.
The team examines long-term weather patterns that begin as
thunderstorms thousands of miles away over the waters near
Indonesia.
If we see a lot of activity there, it's sort of like somebody
bouncing up and down in a wave pool with a raft, Gensini said.
It sends out these waves in the jet stream toward North America
that end up influencing our weather patterns. It takes about a
week or two for those waves to get here, but that wave train is
something that we can latch on to for potential predictability.
He sees the future possibility of a system similar to those that
predict the number of tropical storms prior to the start of the
annual hurricane season.
To land something like this is not only really significant for
our research group, but also just for NIU, as a whole, Gensini
said. It's a pretty humbling thing and we're really excited to
get started on the research.
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