hurricanes
cmooney | March 28, 2007
This year, after being increasingly frustrated with poor or inaccessible records of past hurricanes (in basins other than the Atlantic and East Pacific, anyway), I started keeping my own records. And so I have noted every Joint Typhoon Warning Center advisory this year (er, almost). And in the process, I've noticed something interesting that I'd like to comment further upon, in the hope that some experts may drop in and share their thoughts.
With both Cyclones Indlala and Kara of this month, the same thing happened. In between official advisories, the storms substantially intensified and…
cmooney | March 27, 2007The South Pacific island chain of Vanuatu is a kind of canary in the coalmine for global warming. A settlement on Vanuatu's Tegua Island has already had to be relocated due to sea level rise. (See also here.) The problem was that with ever rising seas, low lying islands--and those living there--are subject to ever higher surges during storms. Eventually, the assault from the ocean becomes too much and you have to move.
In this context, Vanuatu may get a test with cyclone Becky, whose projected path is shown above (courtesy of the RMSC-Nadi Tropical Cyclone Warning Center). So far Becky is…
cmooney | March 18, 2007I just received a long blog comment from Rich, who manages the Black Rock Tourist Park in South Hedland, Australia. They bore the brunt of Cyclone George down there, and Rich's comment makes for fascinating--and harrowing--reading. Here's one tidbit:
The ceilings literally rose and fell inches as the wind whipping over the building sucked at the roof. Walls and windows flexed visibly, as debris, like bullets, peppered the house, tearing long gashes in the colourbond steel cladding. and shattering double glazed windows behind security grills designed to stop impacts.
The rest of Rich's comment…
cmooney | March 16, 2007
NASA now has an image up of what was our strongest storm so far this year--Cyclone Indlala, which was a mid-range Category 4 at its peak with 125 knot winds (144 mph). Pressure is estimated, by the University of Wisconsin folks, to have dropped down to 919 millibars.
As for damage, we don't know that much yet, but there have apparently been heavy losses to the vanilla crop in Madagascar and especially around the cyclone-plagued Antalaha. Today the U.N. made an appeal for $ 9.6 million in humanitarian aid to Madagascar.
Some other news: the gigantic Cyclone Gamede, which also affected…
cmooney | March 15, 2007My recent post on the New York Times attack on Gore has gotten around a lot (see Slate, for example). Robert Wright (of Nonzero fame) also brought it up on BloggingHeads.tv in a dialogue with Mickey Kaus. I encourage you to watch the whole segment, as I think it really has the right take on this incident. Wright says I've been "even-handed" towards Gore, and I take that as a compliment. To reiterate: Gore has the science almost entirely right, although there are certainly areas where you can take him to task. If I do pick around the edges, it's because a) I've become a severe storm junkie;…
cmooney | March 15, 2007
Antalaha, the namesake of this post, is a town on the northeastern coast of Madagascar.
In 2000, according to CNN, Cyclone Hudah struck Antalaha and leveled "nearly every building." It appears that Hudah was a Category 4 storm at landfall. The United Nations added that the town was "approximately 95 perent destroyed," leaving three-quarters of the population, or 130,000 people, in need of emergency assistance.
Four years later, Antalaha got hit again and it was--if that's possible--even worse. The storm was Cyclone Gafilo, and it was a full-fledged Category 5 at landfall. The hit on…
cmooney | March 14, 2007
Cyclone Indlala has intensified at "greater than climatological rate"--i.e., damn fast--and is now a Category 4 storm on its way to slam the northeastern coast of Madagascar (after further intensifying along the way).
I have been looking at the data on this storm from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which uses a technology called the Advanced Dvorak Technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite images. On their latest update they had the storm's pressure down to 919.5 millibars and the wind speed up to 124.6 knots. (JTWC…
cmooney | March 14, 2007
Last night the JTWC said this one was a Category 2 but I suspect it's much stronger than that now. The latest satellite based estimates from Cooperative Institute for Meteorlogical Satellite Studies say closer to Category 4. Madagascar could have a bad landfall ahead...
cmooney | March 12, 2007I am jesting with the title of this post, but only in part. You see, never before in my memory have I seen hurricane intensity models in such radical agreement on a storm as I now see for the storm named Indlada in the South Indian (via Kerry Emanuel's website):
Indeed, there seems to be more consensus on the intensity forecast than there is on the storm's name (which I have variously seen spelled "Indlada" and "Indlala"). Last week the rapid intensification of Cyclone George was not well predicted, but if ever there was a case when we would expect the models to be reliable, it's when the…
cmooney | March 12, 2007
Over at Wikipedia, the storm that caused the damage pictured at left is currently classified as a Category 3 hurricane (albeit one with a very low minimum sea level pressure of 910 millibars). The maximum intensity estimate from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center also corresponds to Category 3. But our very valuable (if fairly technical) dialogue in the comments section on a previous post distinctly suggests that George may have been a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale--and, if so, the year's third such storm.
We don't really know, of course, and quite possibly we never will. At the end…
cmooney | March 9, 2007
Last year, we watched as four rapidly intensifying typhoons in a row hit the Philippines in the space of a few months. Something was just up with the ocean-atmosphere system in that particular area, and it was a deadly combination.
With the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the situation isn't nearly so dire. However, just after getting slammed by a rapidly intensifying George yesterday, it now appears that Pilbara will soon be hit by a steadily intensifying Cyclone Jacob--and in almost the same spot that just experienced George.
How strong will Jacob be at landfall? The current…
cmooney | March 9, 2007
Here we go again. This devastating storm, which rapidly intensified yesterday before striking Port Hedland in northwestern Australia, was estimated to have 110 knot sustained winds by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. 115 knot winds are the cutoff for a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. By these lights, George was a strong Category 3 storm.
But at least according to the advisory preserved here, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's tropical cyclone warning center in Perth was saying at one point that the storm had a minimum central pressure of 910 hectopascals (or millibars).…
cmooney | March 8, 2007
This one rapidly intensified prior to landfall, apparently all the way to borderline Category 3/Category 4 strength just before striking to the east of Port Hedland. In other words, the intensity forecasts undershot considerably....and we'll soon find out just how damaging George actually was, unfortunately. Stay tuned....
cmooney | March 7, 2007
Earlier today, it looked like we were going to have a very intense cyclone off the northwestern coast of Australia. Now it looks worse: Cyclone George has turned south and is expected to strike the Pilbara region somewhere between Onslow and Port Hedland in the next 24 to 36 hours.
A lot now depends on how much George intensifies before landfall. The numbers in the image above, from the Bureau of Meteorology, are on the Australian scale. The current prediction is for a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but intensity prediction is tricky and not that reliable....
cmooney | March 7, 2007Yesterday, I blogged about the latest forecast of Atlantic seasonal hurricane activity. Tropical Storm Risk is predicting a pretty bad year.
Hurricane expert Jeff Masters, though, isn't quite as pessimistic. Looking at the sea-surface temperatures this year and comparing them to the SSTs in February of 2005--just before the hurricane season that shattered all records--Masters finds that
...SST were about 0.5 ºC warmer in February 2005 vs. February 2007 in the region we care about--the hurricane Main Development Region (MDR) between 10 ºN and 20 ºN extending from Africa to the Central…
cmooney | March 6, 2007 Especially since El Nino went away (PDF), hurricane watchers have been worrying about what kind of season we'll see in the Atlantic later this year. El Nino has a well known tendency to suppress Atlantic storms, contributing to quieter years like 2006 (click image). But now, we're expected to see El Nino-neutral or even La Nina conditions (the opposite of El Nino) over the coming months.
The latest forecast from Tropical Storm Risk (PDF), a group based in the UK, only heightens the sense that we may have a bad year ahead.
TSR has now raised its forecast for an active season:
Based on…
cmooney | February 27, 2007
Something very interesting has happened to Cyclone Gamede in the South Indian basin over the past day or so. Due to "competing steering influences" (as the Joint Typhoon Warning Center puts it), the storm hasn't moved much. Instead, it has remained perched off the coast of Madagascar, its rainbands repeatedly lashing that island as well as the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Reunion, as you can see from the NASA image above.
Meanwhile, as Gamede has continually churned over the same stretch of ocean, it has also weakened. Why? Because the storm created huge waves that, in turn, mixed the…
cmooney | February 24, 2007Hurricanes can vary dramatically in size, and it's my understanding that there is not any meaningful correlation between storm size and storm strength. For instance, last week's Category 4 Cyclone Favio, which caused serious damage to Mozambique, was a relatively small storm, as can be seen in this image (with Favio located in the southern Mozambique Channel):
But now look at the latest Meteo France satellite image of the Southwest Indian Ocean, showing the same area as before, but with a huge Cyclone Gamede (945 millibar central pressure, a strong Category 2) in the middle of it.…
cmooney | February 23, 2007
One of the most devastating tropical cyclones of 2004 was Cyclone Gafilo, pictured at left, which struck northern Madagascar at full Category 5 intensity, causing destruction that left hundreds of thousands homeless. And while it's too soon to say yet what will happen, this year's G storm in the South Indian, Gamede, could also be quite troublesome.
Gamede is currently a Category 3 storm, with a minimum sea level pressure estimated at 956 millibars by Meteo France. It is also a very, very large hurricane, considerably larger than Favio was, as you can see from this satellite image:
None of…
cmooney | February 23, 2007This from Reuters AlertNet:
On Thursday, the cyclone Favio demolished large parts of the southern coast in the province of Inhambane. Winds reportedly hit 240 km/h as the storm tore through the tourist town of Vilanculos heading north past outlying villages, destroying schools, hospitals and the homes of thousands of people in its path....In the town of Vilanculos and its surrounding area alone, 30,000 people are now without a roof over their heads.
Another report, from Reuters, says that some people were actually sleeping when the storm hit Vilanculos, suggesting that warnings were not…