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100K Lose Power As America Faces Its Third Hurricane In Three Weeks (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The good news: Hurricane Nate was eventually downgraded to "a tropical storm" at 4:30 Sunday morning (EST), moving north-northeast with maximum winds of 70 mph. The bad news: 100,000 people don't have power in Mississippi and Alabama, and a tornado watch is in effect until 11 a.m. "Even though Nate has made landfall and will weaken today, we are still forecasting heavy rain from Nate to spread well inland towards the Tennessee Valley and Appalachian mountains," ABC News meteorologist Daniel Manzo said Sunday morning. Saturday the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Mississippi was hit with 85 mph winds and a storm surge of between four to five feet. "Gulf Coast residents are waking up to a wet, windy -- and in some cases, powerless -- Sunday morning," reports ABC News, "but it's still not as devastating as they expected."
Yep, storms rapidly lose power over land. That said, there are places that still could be looking at 5" of rain.
Anyone in NE Alabama, NW Georgia or Eastern Tennessee should keep alert for flood warnings. If you do go out, do not try to drive through standing water more than a couple inches deep, particularly if that water is moving.
Remember it's flooding that kills the most people in most storms in the US. Very few people live in a structure that would be blown down by even a category 3 storm (excepting trailers).
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Oh, come now. This is news for nerds after all.
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Certain people like to confuse hurricanes not hitting the US and hurricanes not happening at all.
Hurricanes hitting the US are the product of a long string of chaotic interactions between low pressure areas and surrounding weather systems. Climate models aren't very good at predicting those, so we don't really know if hurricanes will be more frequent under the various global warming scenarios.
The thing that the models consistently point to is greater rainfall, wherever the hurricane happens to go. That, along with increased development in flood-prone areas, will make future hurricanes more costly and dangerous.
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Close, but not really.
Climate models do not predict more hurricanes.
They do predict stronger hurricanes.
We also conclude that it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes. In our view, there are better than even odds that the numbers of very intense (category 4 and 5) hurricanes will increase by a substantial fraction in some basins, while it is likely that the annual number of tropical storms globally will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged.
Reference
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If number of hurricanes is your measure, then recent history suggests global cooling.
There may very well be AGW, but hurricanes aren't proof of it. You would expect, maybe, 2 or 3 extra hurricanes a century, with a 2% increase in average strength.
AGW does itself a disservice by hyperventillating over things like this. Look into things like regression to the mean and what a few degrees actually means.