KINGSTON, R.I., April 28, 2016—Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center will discuss ways to improve hurricane forecasts during a talk May 3 at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

The Charles and Marie Fish Lecture, at noon in Corless Auditorium on URI’s Narragansett Bay campus, is free and open to the public. The lecture will be livestreamed and archived at Charles and Marie Fish Lecture.

During the talk, “Inside the Eye: Improving Hurricane Forecasts,” Landsea will discuss the nation’s hurricane warning program.

Landsea is the science and operations officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. Besides forecasting and training responsibilities, he’s responsible for projects that can help monitor and forecast hurricanes.

Landsea holds a bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and a master’s degree and doctorate in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University.

He conducted graduate work with the late Bill Gray, one of the world’s leading experts on hurricanes and tropical meteorology. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in many journals, including Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Climatic Change, EOS, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Monthly Weather Review, Nature, Science and Weather and Forecasting. In 2011 he was co-recipient of a U.S. Department of Commerce gold medal “for excellence in research and data stewardship leading to a more confident assessment of the influence of human-induced climate change on hurricanes.”

The National Hurricane Center provides analyses, forecasts and warnings over large parts of the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Advances in observational capabilities, numerical weather prediction, and forecaster tools and support systems over the past two decades enables the center to make more accurate forecasts and extend forecast lead times. Limitations, however, persist.

The Charles and Marie Fish Lecture is supported by the Charlie and Bobbie Fish Endowment for Oceanography. The endowment was established in 1989 by the Fish family in memory of Charles and Marie Fish. Through their joint efforts, the Fishes established a marine biological program at the University of Rhode Island in 1935, and eventually a graduate program in oceanography at the Narragansett Marine Laboratory, which later became URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

For more information, contact URI’s Office of Marine Programs at 401-874-6211.