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Puzzling Electric Hurricanes

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the zap-me-like-a-hurricane dept.

SpaceAdmiral writes "Hurricanes seldom have lightning because they primarily consist of horizontal winds (as opposed to vertical winds). However, three of the biggest storms of 2005 (Rita, Katrina, and Emily) had plenty of lightning and NASA has an interesting write-up about it." Bottom line is "we still have a lot to learn about hurricanes."

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Modesty and Knowledge. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Bottom line is "we still have a lot to learn about hurricanes.""

    Bottom line: we have a lot to learn about a great deal.

    1. Re:Modesty and Knowledge. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your theology is sophisticated and admirable; unfortunately, it's also not typical of the people who use religion as a blunt instrument to attack science -- and like it or not, there are a lot of those people, and they have significant political power.

      Science could indeed be used as a doctrine of control, but if it were, it would of necessity be warped so far that it would no longer be "science" by any reasonable definition of the word. In fact, there are historical examples: Lysenkoism and Intelligent Design spring immediately to mind, and there are probably others. In order to function, um, scientifically, science requires freedom of both thought and action.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  2. Re:Pardon my Ignorance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bravo!

    This is an important point that is sometimes forgotten when we study hurricanes. It's always amusing to hear news forcasters say that a certain hurricane is the most violent in 100 years or that it had some characteristic never seen before. How do they know? How do we know if Wilma was bigger than the Galveston hurricane when the Galveston hurricane was out to sea? Heck, how do we even know that the category system of hurricanes is related to energy? Katrina as a Cat 3 made Andrew as a Cat 4 look small. And Tropical Cyclone Tracy--a strong Cat 5--was barely 50 miles across. Then there is Tropical Cyclone Tip that was 1500 miles across. For some reason this seems to me to be like measuring the speed of a car by RPMs of the wheels without taking into account the circumference of the wheels--occasionally a tiny car with 3" tires looks likes its going Mach 3.