Tag: Galveston

Now It’s The Hurricane Season

My friend Bob, the meteorology professor, just sent me an email with not much more than this link. Half past midnight on Saturday. He knew I’d be checking the mail.

The Atlantic is open. Hurricane season has begun – even with no Atlantic hurricanes.

Yes, I know the season’s officially underway June 1. That’s minor league stuff. The real hurricane season is squeezed in from the middle of August to the middle of September.

For the past few days the GFS (a physics based, dynamic weather model) has been showing a strong, hurricane like storm, moving off the coast of Africa heading toward the states.

The GFS is not made to predict tropical weather, and it does so poorly. Still, when run-after-run shows the same thing, you look. They have at the Hurricane Center.

A VIGOROUS TROPICAL WAVE IS LOCATED OVER THE FAR EASTERN ATLANTIC OCEAN ABOUT 300 MILES SOUTHEAST OF THE SOUTHERNMOST CAPE VERDE ISLANDS. SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS HAVE CHANGED LITTLE IN ORGANIZATION THIS EVENING. HOWEVER…CONDITIONS APPEAR FAVORABLE FOR GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM…AND A TROPICAL DEPRESSION COULD FORM DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO AS IT MOVES WESTWARD AT 15 TO 20 MPH.

Bob’s impressive model outputs are of the same storm, what looks to soon be Dean. These maps are different from my normal charts, but the bottom line’s the same.

Though I said the GFS has been forecasting this storm, it hasn’t been consistent with the long range path. A few days ago it took a sharp right, missing Florida and sailing close to shore, but off the East Coast. Another run had the storm moving into the Gulf and making landfall between Galveston and New Orleans. That’s a pretty big difference!

Obviously, we don’t have a clue yet, except this looks like Dean. And, it looks like Dean will be strong.

The next month will be busy.

Rita As An Underachiever

From Forbes.com “”It looks like the Houston and Galveston area has really lucked out,” said Max Mayfield, director of the hurricane center. “

That one characterization pretty much sums up Hurricane Rita’s arrival on the Gulf Coast. In reality, everyone lucked out.

There is a very fine line in being a weatherman (I can actually refer to myself as meteorologist, but I’m worried it sounds pretentious when it comes from me and not someone else). With big storms, you want to be accurate and convey the gravity of the situation without going overboard.

I spent a good part of the last few days hoping my worst fears would be wrong – and hoping if they were, people would not punish me for a forecast that was too pessimistic. In essence, I wanted to be right and wrong at the very same time.

When Hurricane Rite first clocked in at 175 mph, I swallowed hard. That’s quite a spectacular example of physics at work. There’s not much that can take 175 mph sustained winds – or the 200+ mph gusts that accompany them.

I knew the storm would diminish, you don’t need to be a meteorological genius to know that, but I didn’t know how much.

And, of course, I worried about the imponderables in Houston and even Dallas. Maybe I’ve read too many scientific papers where theory rules and the real world is just an imaginary setting. We really haven’t seen a significant hurricane blow through a city of tall buildings, like Houston.

Rita came on shore overnight. She’s a tropical storm now and will probably become a regular old low pressure system soon. The damage is significant. If we hadn’t had Hurricane Katrina, it would seem a lot worse. The damage will be calculated with 10 digit numbers as opposed to 11 or 12.

Amazing. We look at damage in the billions of dollars and marvel how we got off easy.

There is a rising tide of popular opinion that wants to tie this year’s hurricane season into Global Warming. And, of course, Global Warming proponents (they are for the theory, not for the outcome) are quick to fan these flames.

You can’t base scientific theory on popular opinion – and certainly not on one or two years of storms in only one of the world’s hurricane basins. This is much too complex to draw a conclusion from that small amount of data.

When I was a kid, I never could understand how the United States had any people before 1900, because everyone I knew was an immigrant, child of immigrants or grandchild of immigrants. I only knew what I personally saw. I didn’t have a broad enough set of facts and circumstances to make an educated stab at a theory.

I was a kid. Lack of scientific basis or proper research techniques didn’t stop me. I am scared that same kind of logic is in play today.

Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, auditions for “Stan” have just begun:

SATELLITE IMAGES SHOW THAT THE AREA OF DISTURBED WEATHER A FEW HUNDRED MILES SOUTHWEST OF THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS IS DEVELOPING A SURFACE CIRCULATION BUT THE SHOWER ACTIVITY REMAINS POORLY ORGANIZED. UPPER-LEVEL WINDS COULD BECOME MORE CONDUCIVE FOR SLOW DEVELOPMENT DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO.

Rita On My Mind

I woke up late this morning to hear Hurricane Rita had been upgraded to 140 mph. This is a major hurricane.

My favorite observational tool is radar. You really get a feel for the structure of the storm with radar that you can’t get with satellite imagery, but Rita’s now too far from shore to get a meaningful radar return.

The satellite shows everything you don’t want to see. Rita remains symmetrical. There don’t seem to be any external forces distorting the shape, implying Rita is not being tugged or prodded by the outside environment. Further strengthening in the short term seems likely.

The Hurricane Center has shifted the projected landfall south. That’s farther away from Galveston and Houston… but still in the neighborhood.

There is an area between Houston and Corpus Christi that seems to be less densely populated. It’s not as desolate as the area closer to Brownsville. Still there is a nuclear plant there. There’s also a large industrial complex I can’t identify, except to say a railroad line runs right through it

We don’t have any say in this.

I don’t envy the people of Texas. A train is coming down the tracks – they can see it, but they can’t stop it. And, the memory of Katrina is so fresh in everyone’s mind.

Now It’s Rita That’s Got Me Worried

I should have started this over the weekend, because a new storm was the source of almost immediate ‘meteo chatter.’

Ophelia passed to my south. Phillippe is out-to-sea where he will cause little harm. Rita is in a bad spot with the promise of intensification.

There’s no doubt, New Orleans is the most vulnerable city for hurricanes in the US – duh. After that, Key West and Galveston are high up on the list. The official track projection for this storm, still a tropical storm and not a hurricane, impacts both cities!

Key West is an island with little land significantly above sea level. It is possible that during a significant hurricane (which Rita probably won’t be at the time) the entire island could briefly disappear as it was overwashed. There wouldn’t be the lasting flooding of New Orleans.

Galveston too is an island and prone to hurricane surges. Isaac’s Storm, the scariest book I’ve ever read, describes Galveston during the 1900 Hurricane. It stands as America’s most deadly natural disaster. Somewhere between 6-12,000 were killed, with most bodies never found.

From Wikipedia:

Since its formal founding in 1839, the city of Galveston had weathered numerous storms, which the city survived with ease. Residents believed any future storms would be no worse than previous events. In order to provide an official meteorological statement on the threat of hurricanes, Galveston Weather Bureau section director Isaac Cline wrote an 1891 article in the Galveston News in which he argued not only that a seawall was not needed to protect the city, but that it would be impossible for a hurricane of significant strength to strike the island.

The seawall was not built, and development activities on the island actively increased its vulnerability to storms. Sand dunes along the shore were cut down to fill low areas in the city, removing what little barrier there was to the Gulf of Mexico.

Rita isn’t much more than 24 hours from Key West. If the people there are lucky, the storm won’t intensify much, nor will it jog to the north.

Galveston has a bigger question mark. The five day forecast from the Hurricane Center aims squarely at Galveston (for purposes of this entry, let the cone of uncertainty be damned).

If you were living there, what would you do today? The storm is five days away and most likely will find another track before it arrives… or maybe not.