James Franklin

James Louis Franklin is a former weather forecaster encompassing a 35-year career with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He served as the first branch chief of the newly formed Hurricane Specialist Unit (HSU) before his retirement in 2017. Education and xareer Franklin graduated from the Ransom Everglades School in Miami, where he was a co-valedictorian in 1976 before going on to graduate with a Master of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. Most of his career was dedicated to developing better ways to more accurately predict hurricane intensity. In an interview as branch chief, he stated that it is much easier to predict the trajectory of a hurricane than the intensity of a hurricane due to a "lack of understanding of how the physical processes work, lack of observations of the small-scale features that are controlling intensity, and to some extent the models are not advanced enough." Moreover, in 2012 Franklin said “predicting storm intensity requires knowing lots of small-scale details that computer models have trouble capturing, from the dynamics of a storm’s structure to the characteristics of air masses being pulled into a storm’s circulation.”