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When Did Irene Stop Being a Hurricane?
jamesl writes "Cliff Mass, a climate researcher at the University of Washington and popular Seattle blogger, asks, 'When did Irene stop being a hurricane? ... there is really no reliable evidence of hurricane-force winds at any time the storm was approaching North Carolina or moving up the East Coast. ... I took a look at all the observations over Virgina, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York. Not one National Weather Service or FAA observation location, not one buoy observations, none reach the requisite wind speed. Most were not even close. ... Surely, one of the observations upwind of landfall, over Cape Hatteras or one of the other barrier island locations, indicated hurricane-force sustained winds? Amazingly, the answer is still no.' Cliff supports his statement with data from NOAA/NWS/NDBC presented in easy to understand charts."
Knowing when it wasn't a hurricane won't help those injured or killed, or fix the damage. Just someone interested in playing Monday Morning Quarterback....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Yes, it was a Bad Storm. Nobody is going to deny that. However, the media's over-hype and over-coverage of the storm could have a serious "boy who cried wolf" effect. I would hate to see people woefully under-prepared if and when the next "Katrina" arrives, due to lack in confidence in media storm reporting and forecasting. We really don't need to instill a mindset of "it's not going to be as bad as they say it is" in hurricane prone areas. That kind of thinking costs lives, but is none the less engendered by ratings hungry news networks over-hyping relatively weak storms like Irene.
And watch this hurricane! Oh boy it's gonna be historic!
Now keep watching... keep watching... keep watching...
It's the difference between epidemiology and medicine, or between actuarial predictions and fortune-telling. I might be able to predict that 10% of a population will get a disease, or that 0.054% of 43 year old females in North Dakota will break their left femur this year, without being able to tell you which individuals it will be. There's no reason to assume that large-scale predictions entail small-scale ones.
.sig withheld by request
Glad to see others publicly noticing the wind speed discrepancies and general weakness of the storm.
Related to that is some local stations not only referred to it as a hurricane, but further stated that hurricane force winds extended out 125 miles from the eye when it was already very evident, even to many TV news reporters, some of who, that morning, on the air, characterized it as more akin to a Nor'Easter.
Makes some, including myself, wonder whether state and local governments, from pressure by the Feds, used the storm as a pretext to test shutting down entire mass transit systems and mass evacuations; not to see if it was possible, but what the public reaction would be, and the amount of compliance - reportedly, some local authorities, for people who refused to leave, were demanding them to provide their names and social security numbers.
Ron
Question marks apparently.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I thought that was pretty cute too. It was as if they had a boat out in the thick of it or something measuring the thing live, what with the way it was animated to drift in fits and starts between 90mph and 110mph or so.
Then they goofed up: They had some schmuck standing on the coast of North Carolina saying that it was just about to get the worst of it all... I almost expected the poor slob to suddenly get blown away, or one of those effects out of the 1995 movie Twister (you know, flying cows and shit).
Turned out that the winds barely kept up with the average winter storm on the Oregon Coast, at least according to their 'on location' wind speed reports that scrolled along. Stood in pretty sharp contrast to the "wind speed" of the whole storm. Kind of a let-down, really.
The funniest part was the chick standing near Battery Park, looking down at a 6' wide puddle near one of the storm drains, and using language that made it seem that the whole borough was under "1 inch of water so far"... in spite of plainly visible evidence showing otherwise.
I mean, hell... I know the storm did some damage, but they had the hype machine going like the storm was Katrina on methamphetamines...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No, but it might help to determine just WHY the storm was being hyped so much.
That's easy. Because NYC had a chance to be affected and that is where the news organizations are. Secondarily, no government official is going to take the chance of not reacting after the debacle that was Katrina. Anything that might affect NYC is apparently news - even when it isn't. When NYC gets weather that is rather typical where I live you'd think the world was coming to an end. I'm not looking forward to the day when a truly serious natural catastrophe affects NYC. We'll never hear the end of it.
It was a serious storm and needed to be taken seriously and it's probably better to over-react and be prepared than to brush it off. Nevertheless, the media attention was indeed a bit over the top.
It is a thought-provoking idea - "When" did Irene become a hurricane - and well worth my time to consider it. The US Geological Survey is an E-X-C-E-L-L-E-N-T source of information, and, in my humble opinion, criminally underfunded by our tax dollars (especially those companies that won't pay U.S. Taxes).
Use the following link inacoupladays
http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/hurricanes/irene/coastal-change/updated-assessment.php
Just like New Yorkers get to giggle when those Southern folk shut down schools and stock pile supplies like survivalists because they got 2 feet of snow.
New Yorkers (the ones from NYC, not upstate) do that when there is 2 feet of snow. Southern folks shut down when there is 2 INCHES of snow.
Seriously, when I lived in a more southerly latitude, a quarter of an inch of snow would close every school within 15 miles of my house. They simply do not know how to deal rationally with significant amounts of snow. Where I grew up 1-2 feet within 24 hours was rather normal and I've seen as much as 72 inches in just three days. Despite that I didn't get a single snow day when I was in high school. Not one in four years.
From what I can tell, the flooding wasn't nearly what it could have been, either. Unless you call a foot of standing water disastrous. Again, seen much worse. Hell, in 2004 Florida got hit by 5 storms with 3 those more powerful than Irene. And in 2005, there were so many Hurricanes in the gulf region they had to eventually revert to the Greek Alphabet because they got all the way to "Z." There's not really much about Irene that I see as all that impressive, other than the mass panic it caused amongst people who really don't know what to expect from a Hurricane.
Thirty-seven people would disagree with your assessment.
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I'm unsure why we should really care about what buoys floating in the ocean, directly at sea level, say about recorded wind speeds. Instead, I would consider what the radar indicated speeds were. The storm would not have been given a Category 1 rating without the requisite wind speeds being detected. I'll keep my tinfoil hat on the shelf for this one.
Here's some data Cliff Mass must have overlooked:
Here's a helpful map with data:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at201109.asp
Here are the National Hurricane Center reports:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2011/refresh/IRENE+shtml/120913.shtml?
* Note the Wind Speed Probability reports
They also provide this:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at4+shtml/085722.shtml?swath
The Wikpedia article is well-footnoted:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hurricane_Irene
Well, right, but you can lose someone in any kind of weather. There are casualties around here whenever the temperature drops below freezing, usually among the indigent. It's a tragedy for them, but not a multi-state catastrophe as CNN was trying to sell to us.
A few days ago, a couple from Europe died of heat stroke in Death Valley. The local temperature was 105 degrees fahrenheit, which was low for that place in this time of year. In places I've lived, 105 degrees is a nice day. But since two people died, does that mean the weather was catastrophic? Well, if you look at the translated pages from their home town, yeah, they were getting all hysterical because these people were out in 41c weather. I guess where you happen to live, that can seem like a lot.
When the earthquake hit the east coast and everyone got hysterical, wife and I had to laugh. Having lived right on the fault in California, we'd wake up, go "that felt like a 5.3, maybe a 5.5" and go back to sleep.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
At 9:00 am Sunday morning, August 28, EDT. According to the Hurricane IRENE Advisory Archive. At that time, it was centered over New York City (it was 40 miles SSW of there an hour earlier). Until then, estimated and measured wind speeds made the system a hurricane.
If you want to dispute the accuracy of NWS current measurements and estimates, then research how they do it and dispute properly. They use recon aircraft, doppler radar, satellite imagery, balloons, and ships, in addition to buoys and automated surface observation systems, to measure and estimate wind speeds. If you want to dispute the NWS's predictions, then either learn meteorology and forecast models to prepare yourself, or compare past predictions to later observations. If you want to dispute the NWS's warning wording, then compare predicted conditions and their real world impact to the NWS's wording. If you want to dispute the media's hype, then compare their hype to the NWS's warnings, and have fun.
But do not ask such an amazingly easy to answer question like "When Did Irene Stop Being a Hurricane?" in order to stir provocation, without answering it. And do not look at some buoy and automated surface observation system data and claim there was no hurricane just from that.
Your choice of media apparently isn't covering central Vermont and New Hampshire.
This is America, we don't care about some foreign countries nobody's ever heard of before.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The gulf region sort of plans on having occasional large amounts of water that need to be drained away, from tropical storms and hurricanes.
Not so much New England.
There's your difference.
Yeah, had it hit Florida or Mississippi or whatever -- no big deal.
Did you see the flooding up in Connecticut? Something tells me you haven't. They're not prepared to get that much water dumped on them in such a short period of time.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Is that the total dead due to Irene? Just 37?
Roughly 50,000 people die each year due to car accidents, or around 1000 a week. That's 142 a day.
So, you're telling me that this 'hurricane' called Irene, which prompted an "extreme" categorization, which was promised to be the worst storm anyone alive would ever see... killed about 1/4 as many people as an average days roadkill?
Puh-leeze.
I live in a rural area in the Ozarks of Arkansas. It is true that a very small amount of snow (to my upper midwest born/raised sensibilities) brings school to a crashing halt here. But it's not because people do not know how to deal rationally with snow. It's because there are no snow plows, no deicer, and, most importantly, no pavement.
When nearly every road has a significant slope and gravel only if you're very very fortunate, roads become nearly impassible with even a small amount of snow. At only two inches of snow, my neighbors (all of them) are unable to make it up the hill to the highway. When the school buses can not reach the students, and less than 10% of the students are in a position to get to school otherwise, there is just no point in holding school. So...my kids get far more snow days than they want. They've lost their Spring Break the last two years because of snow days...
BTW, did you know that the Honda Odyssey becomes a total sled with only two inches of snow? I've watched our Odyssey, parked on a relatively level spot on the driveway, decide to just slide of the drive SIDEWAYS, down the hill, and into the ditch. Then it's, "wait for the snow to melt" before working to get it unstuck.
I actually wonder if Irene might have had a negative death toll, disrupting enough normal travel patterns to prevent more "normal" accidental deaths than it caused.
I seem to recall that at least one of our military adventures from the past 20 years wound up being rated as safer than staying on base at home for almost exactly that reason: soldiers on mission and keeping sharp to avoid getting shot won't party and drive their cars into utility poles at 3am or get t-boned trying to race a red light at rush hour.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Warning people to protect themselves in the face of a legitimate threat has unmeasurable value to society, it can save countless lives and reduce the actual property damage resulting from unpreparedness. Crying wolf just teaches people to ignore the warnings.
I remember when in 2004 (the year before Kathrina) I read in the news that the major of New Orleans had ordered a (voluntary) evacuation of the city. Checking in wikipedia, I see this was in preparation for Hurricane Ivan. When I saw that and read a bit about how bad the flooding risk was I thought, wow, I need to visit New Orleans before it goes under. By a combination of circumstances I ended up actually visiting the city in December that year.
However, the wikipedia page on Kathrina does not say anything about this "false alarm" as a contributing cause to the bad handling of Kathrina: the major again declared a voluntary, and then a mandatory evacuation, and Ivan even served as a useful excercise of "contraflow" for the evacuation. The problem it seems was not that people did not take the warning seriously, but that they had either nowhere to go or no way to get there.
One link that I read religiously when there's a storm: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
Masters used to fly with the Hurricane Hunters, and his blog is one of the best. Go back and look over his assessment of the storm. Jeff was *never* that worried about the wind, and he explains what apparently has the news media baffled: Irene began an eyewall replacement cycle just before hitting NC, and never recovered.
When an eyewall replacement begins, the storm typically expands. In this case, it meant that Irene had a *HUGE* field of tropical storm-force winds, but only a small pocket of hurricane-force winds on the east side of the storm. Yes, it was a hurricane; just because dood can't find any buoys that support that doesn't mean that it isn't so. The hurricane hunters measured winds > 74 MPH, so it was a hurricane. The fact that winds > 74 MPH weren't recorded as having much land impact has nothing to do with the classification of the storm.
Now, I think the NHC kept the "hurricane" classification a bit longer than was justified, but they possibly did that because they KNOW that most people (especially the news media) focus on winds, instead of the REAL danger from a hurricane: flooding. Even if Irene had completely dissipated to little more than a weak tropical depression by the time it hit New Jersey, you'd still have major damage, power outages and loss of life just from the flooding.
The news media has NEVER understood that. They will invariably put some moron out in the wind with a camera, hoping to get an image of the guy being blown all over the beach. But the primary danger from Irene was flooding, as Masters points out repeatedly in his blog.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
For me in Virginia, the damage continues to accrue at $30/day for gas in the generator. 48 hours after it hit, exactly half of all traffic lights in the county were dark, with only three places to even buy gas.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
I mean, they have hurricanes with flooding, earthquakes, and it is a high profile terrorist target.
They should move the whole city....
I mean...that's what they suggested for New Orleans after Katrina....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
.. The hurricane planes measured hurricane force wind in one of the outer bands of the hurricane. The storm is classified as a hurricane if any area of the storm has hurricane force winds present. Those winds do not need to be over a populated area, near the eye of the storm, or even at sea level. They just need to be somewhere in the storm.