Yikes – Dean Gets Stronger

Earlier this evening, around 8:00 PM, The National Hurricane Center issued a statement saying Hurricane Dean had top winds of 155 mph.

DEAN IS AN EXTREMELY

DANGEROUS CATEGORY FOUR HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE.

SOME STRENGTHENING IS EXPECTED LATER TONIGHT…AND DEAN IS LIKELY

TO BECOME A CATEGORY FIVE HURRICANE PRIOR TO MAKING LANDFALL.

About a half hour later, based on recon data, Dean was upgraded to 160 mph.

000

WTNT64 KNHC 210034

TCUAT4

HURRICANE DEAN TROPICAL CYCLONE UPDATE

NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL042007

835 PM AST MON AUG 20 2007

DATA FROM THE AIR FORCE RESERVE HURRICANE HUNTER AIRCRAFT CURRENTLY

INVESTIGATING HURRICANE DEAN INDICATE THAT MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS

HAVE INCREASED TO 160 MPH…MAKING DEAN A POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC

CATEGORY FIVE HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON HURRICANE SCALE.

$$

FORECASTER KNABB

There’s really no practical difference between 155 mph and 160 mph. Wind force increases logarithmically with the wind speed. But there’s a great perception difference, because at 160 mph, Hurricane Dean becomes a Category 5 storm.

Should Dean strike the Yucatan Peninsula as a Cat 5, it will be the first Atlantic Basin Category 5 landfall since Andrew, 15 years ago!

The only good news is, Dean will be sufficiently south of Cancun to produce less damage than a direct hit. It’s still going to crush the region mercilessly.

Who Is Controlling The Weather?

Here’s a comment that was left earlier to another entry. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten something like this, and we all get these forwarded to us, I might as well add my two cents.

On an unrelated (weather subject), I heard reference to this site, on the George Norney (Coast to Coast AM radio program). The person being interviewed, Richard Hoagland, contended that “someone” is trying to minimize the potential impact of hurricane Wilma. The link shows, to a non weather guy, a unique bright red band of storms. Hoagland contends that is evidence that “someone” is artificially trying to sap the energy of Wilma, before it might become a cat 5!

Geoff –Any comments?

This kind of electronic noise often appears on imagery. Part of my ‘real’ job is to look for this stuff and not show it, because it’s misleading.

Here’s what the website that hosts these images says:

The individual images that are used as input into this product sometimes contain bad data in the form of missing scanlines or anamalously high or low values that often stretch in an arc across the image. When these areas are incorporated into the MIMIC product they form artifacts that fade in and out, and appear to move with the storm center. However, they have no physical meaning and hopefully they will not obstruct your interpretation of the imagery.

Before you listen to anyone who says we can control the weather, understand the power of these storms. When a hurricane stretches over hundreds of miles and reaches up vertically through the atmosphere, that’s a lot mass being dragged around.

Clouds look pretty and seem weightless to us on the ground, but they are real physical objects with real mass. There is nothing we have… probably nothing we can conceive of at the moment, that has the power to affect something this immense.

There will always be people with off center ideas who are willing to exploit the unknown by assigning meanings to meaningless observations. In other words, they’re full of crap.