MIAMI – Everyone in Florida learned a lot about hurricanes this season, including the quickest way to put shutters up and down. And up and down.

But hurricane scientists also learned this: They have much more to learn.

And, with decades of enhanced storm activity coming straight at us, a sense of urgency now prevails.

Scientists need to know more about how, when and why hurricanes suddenly intensify – and weaken. They need new monitoring devices in the air and at sea. They need better computerized forecast models and better graphics and other techniques to more clearly communicate the uncertainty that accompanies forecasts.

They have detailed plans, and Congress – motivated by the election-year barrage of hurricanes – has given them millions of additional dollars for research and development. Scientists say the money is desperately needed.

All of this flows from the four-stage onslaught that shredded much of Florida during August and September, a six-week period that forever will stain a hurricane season that finally, mercifully ends Tuesday.

The preliminary toll, as calculated by the National Hurricane Center in West Miami-Dade County, the American Red Cross and state officials:

Deaths: More than 3,000, with most in Haiti but also including 117 fatalities in Florida directly and indirectly related to the hurricanes. Property damage in Florida: $42 billion. Homes destroyed or sustaining major damage in Florida: 65,000. Families left homeless in Florida: 41,000.

Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

One notable success: Twenty-four hours before Frances struck Florida’s East Coast, the official forecast predicted that it would land at Stuart as a Category 2 hurricane with 105-mph winds. It did exactly that.

One notable setback: Twenty-four hours before Charley struck Florida’s Gulf Coast, the official forecast predicted that it would land at St. Petersburg as a Category 3 hurricane with 115-mph winds. It struck near Captiva, 83 miles from St. Petersburg, as a strong Category 4 storm with 150-mph winds.

That track forecast fell barely within the average margin of error, but the intensity forecast represented a significant miss.

Here is how forecasters, working with research scientists, hope to improve their predictions and advisories:

• The change most obvious to the public could arrive by next season as forecasters work to solve a perplexing problem – how to communicate their uncertainty.

When Charley jogged to the right shortly before making landfall, many residents of Punta Gorda and nearby areas complained that they were taken by surprise, believing the storm would strike farther up the coast.

This, even though they lived squarely in the hurricane warning area and meteorologists and emergency managers repeatedly spoke of the dangers of focusing on a single point in the forecast.

Government forecasters concede that their track-forecast graphic might contribute to the problem because the cone of uncertainty features a center line that seems to aim the storm at a single spot.

So they are experimenting with a graphic that eliminates that center line and with another version that replaces the entire cone with a series of intersecting circles.

The options are to be posted on the hurricane center’s Web site – www.nhc.noaa.gov – for public comment.

• Using $10.5 million in supplemental funding approved by Congress this summer, scientists plan to install an important tool on the entire fleet of hurricane hunter airplanes.

The device is called a stepped frequency microwave radiometer and it allows researchers to more accurately measure a hurricane’s wind speed. This is vital because speeds now attached to most advisories and forecasts often are estimates derived from measurements taken high above the surface.

Ships and planes cannot safely harvest on-the-spot data, but the radiometer can “see” all the way to the surface and provide more accurate measurements.

Scientists plan to install these tools on all hurricane hunter planes over the next few years.

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-Researchers are closing some gaps in the weather buoy network, adding at least six moored instruments in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The buoys provide important sea temperature, wave height, wind speed and other data required by forecasters and their computerized models.

“All of these are in areas where storms develop that could impact Florida,” Rappaport said.

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-Scientists who work in relative anonymity behind the scenes are developing a new computerized forecast model, one that will join the suite of more than a dozen models now employed by forecasters.

Led by researcher Naomi Surgi, the team is creating a “high resolution” model, one that is based on advanced physics and attempts to predict events with greater precision.

Still, scientists emphasize that, in the end, even with better technology and ever-more accurate forecasts, residents of the hurricane zone must accept primary responsibility for their own safety.

“One lesson we learned again this year is that people who had a hurricane plan did much better than people who didn’t have a plan,” said Max Mayfield, director of the hurricane center.

Said Kaplan: “People expect complete precision, and they have to understand that’s probably not possible. But we can improve the forecasts and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

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(c) 2004, The Miami Herald.

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AP-NY-11-26-04 1637EST