hurricanes
cmooney | August 7, 2007 We are going to hear a lot on this subject as August 29--the day two years ago that Hurricane Katrina made its final landfall, as a Category 3 storm, near the Mississippi/Louisiana border--approaches.
I plan to blog continuously about the upcoming anniversary from now until the actual date. To that end--and to set the tone--I'd like to start off by quoting the powerful opening paragraph of Michael Grunwald's recent Time magazine cover story about the continuing vulnerability of New Orleans and the many pathetic failures of the Corps of Engineers (and their congressional supervisors). The…
cmooney | July 31, 2007Man. Japan is getting it bad lately. Just weeks after Supertyphoon Man Yi, another powerful storm is barreling in. Here's the latest satellite image of Typhoon Usagi, just pronounced a Cat 4 with 115 knot sustained winds by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, with an expected intensification to supertyphoon status in the next 24 hours:
And here is the storm's expected track, pointing straight towards Japan's southern island of Kyushu:
Watch out...
cmooney | July 31, 2007The National Hurricane Center just named our third Atlantic storm, Chantal, off the eastern seaboard. Chantal is heading across the Atlantic along with the westerlies, possibly destined to become a quite powerful extratropical storm as it travels towards Iceland and Europe. It is not a threat to the USA.
Anyways: Meet Chantal, currently on a rough latitude parallel with New Jersey:
But before paying too much attention to Chantal, we could have more to worry about from a tropical wave that the National Hurricane Center is currently calling 99L, located northeast of South America and traveling…
cmooney | July 29, 2007It's a long ways out, to be sure. A lot could change and most certainly will. Nevertheless, this storm, which has just formed, is currently forecast to be a Category 3 at landfall and to strike Japan.
For more information check out the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and Tropical Storm Risk. The official tracking agency is the Japan Meteorological Agency. I'll provide updates as warranted....
cmooney | July 27, 2007Last Saturday night, party animals that we are, some friends and I went on Rhapsody and searched for pop songs that mention "hurricanes." Sweet Jesus, there were a lot of them. And a large percentage used "eye of a hurricane" as a bad love metaphor.
So we were inspired to make a hurricane music soundtrack, which we'll be playing today at my D.C.-based party for Storm World. For pop culture mavens (like Sheril), here are the songs, beginning with the classic "The Hurricane" by Bob Dylan--which, of course, isn't really about a hurricane, and which is the best song of the bunch IMHO. After the…
cmooney | July 19, 2007This coming Saturday evening, all across Washington D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia, people are going to have a stark choice to make.
On the one hand, they can curl up at home, their newly purchased or arrived copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in hand, and speed read to find out what happens, who dies, etc. Kleenex at the ready.
Or, they can come out to the famed bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm to hear me talk about Storm World, take questions, and sign books afterwards. After a week and a half on the road, I'm taut, trained, disciplined. Ready to rock you like a…
cmooney | July 18, 2007 Congress is now wading into Episode II of Hurricane Wars. Tomorrow morning the House Committee on Science and Technology will hold a hearing entitled "Tracking the Storm at the National Hurricane Center." I was just emailed the witness list, which I've posted after the jump.
The most obvious thing I've noticed about the hearing list is that while ousted center director Bill Proenza will be testifying, no one currently working at the National Hurricane Center itself is on the roster. I don't know that it's appropriate to be dragging the forecasters before Congress in the middle of the season…
cmooney | July 17, 2007Although the northeastern Pacific just got its first hurricane of the year--Cosme--we haven't yet had a named storm in the Atlantic in July. Clearly, then, this doesn't seem likely to be a repeat of the 2005 hurricane season, when we had two extremely intense July hurricanes (Dennis and Emily). Jeff Masters, who's always reliable, puts the chance of a named storm during the remainder of this month at about 50 percent.
But, the tropical cyclone heat potential in the Caribbean remains very high, and indeed, higher than 2005 levels at a comparable time of year. Check out the image below,…
cmooney | July 12, 2007I want to thank Sheril for the last post. I've literally been so slammed on the road I haven't been able to write anything. Indeed, I don't even have any clothes to wear; I didn't get to pack for the tour due to travel upheaval. (Hence my appearance in a T-shirt with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.)
However, I do take time out from my tour craziness to point out to you a disturbing event unfolding today and tomorrow: Okinawa is about to get hit by a Category 4 equivalent typhoon, Man-Yi. Indeed the storm may strengthen into a supertyphoon just before landfall. Later, Man-Yi is forecast to…
cmooney | July 6, 2007If arguments within the hurricane community were the Star Wars series, then the battle over the relationship between hurricanes and global warming would be Episode I: A New Strife.
Meanwhile, the extraordinary fight that has erupted of late at the National Hurricane Center--pitting now 23 of the center's staff against new director Bill Proenza--would be Episode II: Attack of the Forecasters.
In all seriousness: The last thing the hurricane research and forecasting community needed was another of these battles. Sad. Anyways, you can read the hurricane staff complaint petition here (PDF). It…
cmooney | July 4, 2007
I've barely even met newly installed National Hurricane Center director Bill Proenza. I shook his hand at the National Hurricane Conference last April in New Orleans, and at the American Meteorological Society meeting last January in San Antonio, I asked him a question about hurricanes and global warming at a press conference, which he answered respectably (if cautiously). All in all, he seemed like a nice enough and more than competent guy.
Moreover, when Proenza started speaking out about how NOAA was underfunding his center and not planning adequately to save the ailing QuikSCAT satellite…
cmooney | July 2, 2007Jeff Masters has just posted his outlook on the meteorological factors that should determine hurricane activity over the next two weeks. It's great reading, especially for weather wonks. Masters sees a roughly 70 percent chance of a named storm in the next two weeks, as wind shear is expected to relax and and sea surface temperatures are warm enough.
I was particularly struck by this figure that Masters showed:
I don't think anyone expects the 2007 hurricane season to be as wild as 2005--which, as I detail in Storm World, set all kinda records for July hurricane activity. Nevertheless, this…
cmooney | June 28, 2007
Cyclone 03B (or Yemyin) making landfall in Pakistan on Tuesday. Note the well defined structure, including a cloud filled central eye region.
When do international politics interfere with protecting vulnerable people from hurricanes? Possibly when India has to provide storm warnings for Pakistan.
Jeff Masters and Margie Kieper are blogging about an unfolding scandcal concerning cyclone 03B (or Yemyin), which regenerated earlier this week in the Arabian Sea, intensified, and went on to strike Pakistan. The storm's floods left 250,000 homeless, and guess what: The Indian Meteorological…
cmooney | June 24, 2007
Infrared Arabian Sea image, June 25, courtesy of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As I suspected, this doesn't look good. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center has just put out an advisory on the remants of 03B, warning that the cyclone may soon reform. The warning says this:
RAPID FORMATION OF A TROPICAL CYCLONE IS POSSIBLE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF HIGH OCEAN HEAT CONTENT, LOW VERTICAL WIND SHEAR AND HIGH DIVERGENCE ALOFT.
I'm afraid I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning and this one is going to be much more intense and threatening a…
cmooney | June 24, 2007
Sea surface temperatures in the North Indian tropical cyclone basin as of June 22, courtesy of Accuweather.
Is a repeat of Cyclone Gonu--now estimated to have caused $ 6 billion in damage to Oman and Iran (actually much less than worst case scenarios would have predicted)--possible in the coming week?
Over the past half week, a tropical cyclone known only as 03B developed in the Bay of Bengal and quickly moved ashore over the Indian subcontinent before it could intensify much. Still, meteorology blogger Margie Keiper writes that the associated precipitation contributed to the deaths of…
cmooney | June 20, 2007Throughout the spring and into summer, I've pointed out repeatedly that there has been a consensus, among seasonal hurricane forecasters, that there will be an active season this year in the Atlantic. 17 named storms was Bill Gray's number; NOAA said 13-17. Methodologically, both Gray and NOAA use a "statistical" forecasting technique: In other words, they get these numbers based upon correlations between various climatological factors (and particularly El Nino) and the number of storms that appeared in past seasons.
But there is another, newer type of forecasting: Dynamical seasonal…
cmooney | June 13, 2007Over at the website Truthdig.org--which just won a Webby--I've done a piece about getting ready for this and future hurricane seasons entitled "The Readiness is All." I think we need a comprehensive national hurricane risk assessment project that takes account of the possible effects of climate change--plus the will and the vision to act once we've done the research.
Meanwhile, and hurricane-relatedly....as I've noted previously, my brother Davy, the jazz guitarist, understandably left New Orleans after Katrina took a whack at the music industry (along with everything else). Now he's moving…
cmooney | June 9, 2007Princeton climate scientist Simon Donner has been blogging about Cyclone Gonu and the disturbing way in which the U.S. media seems to care more about oil prices than people killed by the storm. Of course, one might reply that at least our media actually covered this storm. By contrast, it more or less ignored the Madagascan cyclone disasters from earlier this year. No disruption of oil supply involved there, you see. Just destruction of the rice crop, which the people eat, and the vanilla crop, which they rely upon for exports....
cmooney | June 9, 2007
Cyclone Gonu, having weakened down to a Category 1 equivalent storm, lashes Oman and Iran without making a full landfall on June 6, 2007. Image courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory.
This historic storm is now estimated to have killed 70 people in Oman and Iran, and that number may continue to rise. Much of the destruction in Iran appears not to have come from winds or from storm surge but, rather, from intense rainfall of a sort that the region isn't at all used to--and of course, dangerous floods resulted. It seems some Iranian villages were swept away entirely. Let's hope coming days don't…
cmooney | June 7, 2007We're starting to get some sense of what Cyclone Gonu did to Oman. The early reports seem to suggest that there were effective evacuations and thus relatively few fatalities (around 25 with a similar number missing). However, the capital city of Oman was swamped by water, as this AP report details:
- People dragged soaked bedding and carpets from homes Thursday after Cyclone Gonu's winds blew down trees and power lines and its rains sent torrents of water and mud surging through Oman's seaside capital, a city often called the Arab world's tidiest.
....Cleanup crews fanned out across Muscat.…