I wish they’d stop with the hurricane projections that far out since I can’t remember the last time they weren’t wildly wrong.
America is not going to drown itself!
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I’m pretty sure last year a big one was projected to slam into everything and instead spun away at the end.
Arent we only like 7 hours from landfall? I dont think it’s going to lessen significantly or change directions significantly in that time.
maybe wrong but it seems these projections to have the thought process of it’s headed this direction right now so it’ll most likely keep going that way which in reality is very rare.
There’s a lot of rigor and data that go into the large-scale weather models that produce hurricane track projections. It’s certainly a lot more than “it’s going this way and will continue going this way.” My comment earlier was referring to wind speeds rather than path–that it feels like original forecasts have frequently underestimated the eventual strength of hurricanes in recent years–but I am completely willing to accept that this is confirmation bias. I don’t know of any meta-analyses looking at this.
A Cat 5 out at sea could be harmless while a Cat 1 hitting a specific area could be devastating, so Category doesn’t matter as much as location. This one is going to slam the gulf coast with a storm surge that looks to be (a) hitting at high tide, worsening the impact, and (b) hitting an area that is generally low-lying and prone to flooding.
To clarify RM’s post, I actually think he means 20-foot storm surge, i.e. the water level is going to be up to 20 feet higher than normal. The storm is rotating counterclockwise, so the winds on the eastern side of the storm are pushing north, driving water up against the shoreline and potentially causing huge flooding.
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Cat 5 exists and is worse, but that doesn’t mean cat 4 is a walk in the park. Also, the category, which is based on sustained wind speed, isn’t the only only determinant of destructive power: total rainfall, breadth of the storm, and how fast it moves (concentrating vs. spreading out the destruction) are all important factors as well.
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I called it Sunday night. RNC won’t do or say anything tonight either.
This is fun.
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Surge is much worse than that. The water level goes up 20 feet but that doesn’t account for waves. You can see 20 foot waves on top of that surge.
Hurricanes are insane. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds. Think of the amount of energy needed to do shit like that.
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Maybe the storm will do some good and make Vidor permanently uninhabitable.
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Also the timing of when it hits is super important, depending on what the tides are.
Right, Cat 5 is extremely rare - or used to be. Andrew in 1992 and Michael in 2018 were the last two Cat 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the US. All of the other devastating storms you remember were Cat 3 or 4 probably. The category mostly has to do with the wind speed, so you can have a small Category 5 or a huge Category 1 in terms of size.
Storms cause damage/threaten life in a few ways:
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Flooding from storm surge - it typically impacts coastal areas, and the size of the storm is often more important than the intensity in terms of how much water it can push up against the land to create surge. It’s worse to the north/east side of the storm. Making landfall in a low-lying area makes this worse. Hurricane Katrina is a good example of this type of storm.
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Flooding from rain - this happens when the storm moves slowly or stalls out, and again the wind intensity is often less important than the size of the storm. All hurricanes have tons of moisture, so a very slow moving Cat 1 or Tropical Storm can still cause tons of flooding. Hurricane Harvey in Houston is a good example of this type of storm.
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Wind - this one is more self explanatory, but it’s worth noting that it’s not just the intensity of the wind but the size of the windfield at a given intensity. So again you could have a Category 3 with less intensity but a larger windfield, potentially, or you could have a Category 5 with both the intensity and the large windfield. Hurricane Andrew is a good example of a storm that caused intense wind damage, but it was a somewhat smaller sized storm. But a Cat 4 is still very intense wind, this one is currently sustaining 140 mph winds and probably gusting to 180+.
As for this particular storm, given its size, where it’s hitting, the shape of the coastline, the amount of areas that are low lying, etc, it’s going to push a ton of water into low lying areas, creating massive storm surge flooding. It’s also going to make landfall with very high windspeeds. These drop as it moves in over land, because it draws its strength from being over warm water… But landfall at this speed means it’ll maybe be a Cat 1 or 2 pretty far inland, which means downed trees way way inland - like Arkansas, maybe even western Tennessee. So we’re talking massive power outages.
The good news is that, knock on wood, we’re missing direct hits on Houston or New Orleans, which would have been even worse. We seem to be missing Beaumont as well, which is a more populated area of economic importance due to oil and gas. So, that part is good at least. Well, as good as can be.
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30 miles inland is barely above sea level. The whole area is an enormous swamp.
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I played in Lake Charles a few years ago. I hope the damn thing hits as few population centers as possible and moves fast. Rather see the water spread out over a large area than sit on the coast like a couple of hurricanes have down recently.
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Yup. The Louisiana coast ain’t exactly the cliffs of Dover.
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Lake Charles is one of the strangest places I have ever been. All casinos and petrochemical plants situated on what otherwise would be a pretty place. Anyway, good luck to them. Anything Cat 3 or above is an auto-evacuate for us so I’m glad as hell this isn’t heading toward New Orleans. Considering enhanced unemployment money is being drawn from FEMA funds (I believe) there are probably a lot of people in this country that should be thankful NOLA or Houston weren’t hit.
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A sizable chunk of US refining capacity is in that area iirc. It won’t appreciably affect petroleum supplies, but will be used as an excuse to straight jack us at the pumps anyway.