Ernesto Rodríguez

• Science and Operations Officer at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Increased frequency and length of high heat episodes are leading to more cardiovascular issues and asthmatic responses among the population of San Juan, the capital of the island of Puerto Rico, USA. An urban heat island effect, which leads to foci of higher temperatures in some urban areas, can raise heat-related mortality. The objective of this r...

Extreme heat episodes are becoming more common worldwide, including in tropical areas of Australia, India, and Puerto Rico. Higher frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat episodes are triggering public health issues in most mid-latitude and continental cities. With urbanization, land use and land cover have affected local climate directl...

CariCOOS has implemented a mirror run of the operational numerical weather prediction model employed by the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office San Juan (NWS WFO SJU), which is based on the WRF NMM model. The model configuration consists of a one-way nesting of two domains with a horizontal resolution of 6-km and 2-km, respectively. Ca...

The northeast Caribbean as other insular regions lack reliable high-resolution weather forecast data of 10meter winds to serve as the engine of numerical ocean models targeting high resolution waves and currents forecasts for nearshore areas. This issue is exacerbated due to the complex orographic features of the Antilles, which govern topographic...

The modeling of hazardous storm surge inundation events in U.S. island regions in the Caribbean and Pacific poses many challenges. Importantly, compared to mild-sloped sandy beaches, waves play a more significant role in driving the storm surge in these steep, reef-fringed environments. As a result, NOAA/NWS currently lacks an operational inundatio...

U.S. island regions in the Caribbean and Pacific pose many challenges to the accurate modeling of hazardous wave-dominated storm surge inundation events; for example, NOAA/NWS lacks an operational inundation prediction system capable of forecasting these conditions. Model evaluation depends on data from island areas, and Puerto Rico (PR) and the U....

Climatic conditions that affect the interannual variability of Caribbean hurricanes are studied. Composite meteorological and oceanographic reanalysis fields are constructed for active and inactive seasons since 1979, and differences are calculated for spring and summer periods to provide guidance in statistical analysis. Predictors are extracted f...