SOMETCUBA - Good Morning, Dr. Landsea, let’s go to the beginning. Where and when were you born, and how did your studies developed until you graduated?

C. L. - Well, Thanks you for having me here today. I was born in the United States, in a town called Urbana, in the state of Illinois. Soon after I was born, my parents decided to move away from the cold weather and moved to Miami. Shortly after we moved there, however, our town in Miami was hit by hurricane Betsy, and maybe that was foreshadowing that I was going to get interested in hurricanes later on. In high school I was in a class, at the public schools, where I got out of school early and went to work at the hurricanes research division of NOAA, and at that point I decided I wanted to pursuit meteorology as a career, and specifically to study hurricanes, so from Miami I went to undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles and then to Colorado State University and studied with Dr. Bill Gray, who is fairly well known in hurricane science.

SOMETCUBA - Why did you dedicate to the study of tropical cyclones? I guess you already explained part of it.

C. L. - Yes, well I can elaborate a bit more, In High school, when I worked at the Hurricane Research Division for class credit I would work with Jack Pesch and Frank Marks, and we would work for a few hours, and then, since we were working on an island, we went across the street, and wind surfed, and I thought, Wow! This is the life, work for a few hours, and then you wind surf for the rest of the day. I’m going to be a meteorologist! I quick learned its a little more work than that, but I really enjoy meteorology and studying hurricanes.

SOMETCUBA - How did Bill Gray influence in your professional life?

C. L. - Well I was a student with Bill Gray from 1988 until 1994, and I still collaborate with him on the seasonal forecast and in other projects. He is an incredible mentor, he taught me just about most things I know about hurricanes and his influence has been wonderful. He really pays close attention to his students, demands quite a bit, but he is very fair, and like I said, very intuitive, he understands the mechanisms of how the tropics work, and I picked up a little bit of that.

SOMETCUBA - Which are the main research lines that you develop?

C. L. - Well, I have three main focuses that I’ve been pursuing for the last couple of years, one of which is the seasonal forecast, both with Dr. Gray as a collaborator, and now with NOAA as one of the lead investigators. Secondly, I’m interested in the evaluation of skill for forecasting “El Niño”, how well do we actually predict it, and lastly I’m involved with the re-analysis of the hurricane records for all of the Atlantic, where we are trying to extend the record back in time but also to reanalyze more recent storms and make sure that the track is correct and the intensity is correct.

SOMETCUBA - How do you assess the fulfillment of the seasonal forecasts, has there had any influence the global climate change in the seasonal forecast?

C. L. - Yes, the seasonal forecast has been a success. They were treated with skepticism when Dr. Gray first started doing them in the mid 1980’s. But it has demonstrated without a doubt that there is a substantial skill and that you can anticipate, most years, how active or quiet the season is going to be. As far as global warming, it does not appear that has had a significant influence in the number of hurricanes, it is a difficult topic to fully understand, but from what we anticipate, the global warming will only have a small influence on hurricanes, maybe slightly stronger, and frequency maybe not change much, and in comparison, these longer term decade to decade changes are much, much larger, and those, must vital changes, we need to be more concern about, in my opinion.

SOMETCUBA - Yesterday, at the Institute of Meteorology, you pronounced a conference on re-analysis and classification of tropical cyclones. Can you explain us briefly, what does this work consists of and how important it is?

C. L. - Right, the re-analysis project is a three years project, and we are about half way trough it right now and it is involved in the collection of data for all hurricanes in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico going back to 1850, so the current data base only extends to 1886, so we are adding 35 more years on to the length of the data. Additionally we are taking a closer look at more recent storms because the changes in methodology cause a bias in how they were perceived in intensity so you want to collect the original data and re-analyze it with today’s methodologies. I’m fortunate that the colleagues here at the Institute of Meteorology, Ramón Pérez and his co-workers have been doing an amazing amount of work on the Cuban hurricanes all the way back to 1799 and what we want to do is incorporate that data, that tremendous work into this re-analysis, not to claim credit for it, but just because I don’t want to do all that extra work they have already done, amazingly wonderful work.

SOMETCUBA - How do you assess the exchange with Cuban scientists and institutions regarding this work of re-evaluation? You already answered part of it

C. L. - I should continue a bit more. Yes, what they have found was that there are cycles of hurricanes in Cuba as well, in particular, the last part of the 1800 and the early 1900 were very busy averaging one hurricane per year and the last few decades, only one half per year or less. So it very much fits the same cycles of activity seen in other parts of the Atlantic. So what we want to do is incorporate their findings into data. I don’t think I need to alter what they have done, they‘ve done an outstanding work, and it would be nice if other countries could do the same, but I don’t think they have the ability or the resources that the Cuban meteorologists have.

SOMETCUBA - We’ve heard that you fly on reconnaissance planes. Any anecdote, special anecdote?

C. L. - Yes, back there was a hurricane that was going over Cuba in 1996, that was one of my memorable ones, I’ve flown about a dozen hurricanes onboard the NOAA’s hurricane hunters, the Orion P3 aircrafts and the first few I flew, were not too turbulent, a little bit of jolting up and down, but not too bad, so we had the assignment of fixing the storm just north of Cuba, and it was starting to rapidly intensify, so I got a big sandwich and ate it at the beginning of the flight, and unfortunately, Lily was intensifying rapidly, there were thunderstorms everywhere and we were doing figures 4 through the storm and we did not get outside of the bumps for eight hours straight and so needless to say my stomach was not feeling well, and I learnt that I need to respect hurricanes a little bit more, specially rapidly intensifying ones, and off course, Lily did cause many problems in Cuba as well.

SOMETCUBA - Regarding this method of flying into hurricanes. Do you intend to carry it on as a regular method of investigating hurricanes, or just research as to see if there are other means to obtain the same information without the need to fly into hurricanes?

C. L. - Well, that’s a good question, the aircraft have been used for investigating hurricanes since 1944, and research missions have been going on since the 50’s and even today, with the satellites that are available, they still do not get the in situ data that is needed for both forecasting and research purposes, for example, on the plane, you have two Doppler radars, one that spins vertically and one that spins horizontally, and we can get the reflectivity information from the amount of rainfall, as well as the velocities. We can not get that from the satellite, so yes, I, for the foreseeable future for both, forecasting and research I see a need for flying into hurricanes to continue.

SOMETCUBA - How do you foresee the future of tropical cyclonology?

C. L. - There are many facets to understanding hurricanes, and I think the toughest challenges we have are three different ones that are very difficult. One is understanding this multi-year changes in hurricane activity, how does that changes the climatology, how does that compares versus the climatology, and dealing with that when you go from a quiet period, like the United States and Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean have had the last 25 years, and now we go back to busy period. Are we prepared for that? Secondly, there is the question of global warming, How does it affect the hurricane activity? We think it is a small impact, but we really don’t know much. Another big, important question for the science of hurricanes is forecasting day to day intensity changes. We do not do that very well at all, it is just a little more than an educated guess, and when we have a rapidly intensifying hurricane near land, that’s when a disaster could occur and many fatalities can happen, so we need to improve our understanding of the physics of how hurricanes work, and translate that into better forecasts of intensity.

SOMETCUBA - Any final words?

C. L. - I’m just so pleased to be able to come to Havana for a week, and work with the researchers of the Institute, I have corresponded with some by e-mail, but there is nothing like been in person and working in person with everybody here, I hope to continue to collaborate with every one, and it’s been a wonderful privilege and an honor,

SOMETCUBA - Thanks you very much, Dr. Landsea for granting us this interview.

C. L. - Thanks you very much.