#hurricane

www.theweather.com

NOAA sticks with quieter hurricane season forecast—but don't let your guard down

NOAA's updated outlook continues to call for fewer Atlantic storms than average, though experts stress that now is not the time to let your guard down

sentientmedia.org

Extreme Weather Events Like Hurricanes Can Spread Antibiotic Resistance Genes

In early October of 2024, Hurricane Milton made landfall near Siesta Key, Florida. At least 19 tornadoes tore through 5.7 million acres of agricultural land, tossing up neatly laid pastures while swollen rivers and creeks flooded cattle ranches and poultry farms across the state. Chamteut Oh, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, studies microbes in the environment. While federal and state governments dispatched emergency responders to deal with the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, Oh was thinking about a mounting public health threat lurking in the waters winding through hurricane-damaged farms: antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial-resistant infections cause 1.27 million deaths per year globally. Manure from livestock farms contains high levels of antimicrobial resistance genes, and when hurricanes and floods spread that manure around, it can carry these genes to new bacteria that can infect people. As the 2026 hurricane season picks up, microbiologists are increasingly concerned that extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods may be spreading these genes through waste from factory farms and other sources. For instance, Oh’s team found that Hurricane Milton transported antibiotic-resistant genes from land-based bacteria to coastal environments, research they published in a recent preprint. In a world where global warming is...

startupfortune.com

Google DeepMind Open-Sources WeatherNext 2 for Faster Hurricane Forecasts

Google DeepMind has open-sourced WeatherNext 2, an AI model that forecasts hurricanes far faster than physics-based systems and beats its own predecessor on nearly every variable it tracks. Google DeepMind this week released the code and weights behind WeatherNext 2 and a companion cyclone model, WeatherNext Cyclones, on GitHub, as Engadget reported. Anyone, a university lab, an airline, an insurer, a government forecasting office, can now download and run the same system Google uses to power weather results in Search, Gemini, Pixel Weather and its Maps Platform Weather API. That's not a paper. That's the model itself. The headline number is speed. WeatherNext 2 completes a full ensemble forecast, hundreds of possible weather scenarios generated from noise injected into a single input, in under a minute, running on just one TPU. Google says that's roughly eight times faster than the physics-based models national weather agencies have relied on for decades, and it comes at up to one-hour resolution, sharper than most operational systems produce. Accuracy improved too. According to DeepMind, WeatherNext 2 beats its prior generation, built on the GenCast architecture, on the large majority of the variables it tracks, temperature, wind, humidity, across every lead time from zero to...

www.caranddriver.com

SRT Develops System That 'Virtually Eliminates" Turbo Lag and Helps Boost Engine Power

To mimic a supercharged V-8's feel, an electronic supercharger instantly spools the turbos, improving acceleration and responsiveness.