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Satellites are the most useful, as they can track hurricanes anywhere on Earth. Both visible and infrared imagery are used in addition to a few other types of sensing. Visible is just essentially a "camera" view of the storm from space, which allows the structure and organization to be observed. This allows forecasters to determine whether it is strengthening or not, etc. Infrared is also useful for determining structure and strength, as it observes the temperature of the cloud tops. This gives an indication of how high the convection (clouds) are extending into the troposphere, and is an indication of how strong the storm is. Infrared and infrared-derivative sensors can also look at the ocean in the region of the hurricane to determine how much energy is available to the hurricane in the warm ocean water.

Forecasters also use atmospheric observations which are taken from weather balloons, satellite profilers of the atmosphere, radiosondes (containing the same instruments as balloons, essentially) that are dropped from planes flying into the hurricane, and measurements taken by the plane itself. These measure all types of variables such as temperature, humidity, wind direction/speed/shear, and atmospheric pressure.

When hurricanes get close to land, they can be observed by Doppler radar on the ground. This is more useful in "nowcasting" - determining what is going to happen in the sort term. Radar is not of great use for medium-range forecasts.

With all the data that are gathered, particularly data that is collected from different levels of the atmosphere (rather than much of the remotely-sensed data), it is fed into complex comuter models that model the atmosphere into the future. These models predict both the strength and movement of the hurricane with varying amounts of accuracy. Obviously the accuracy decreases with time, and errors can be extremely large beyond 3 days, especially when steering winds are weak and erratic.

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