New before-and-after aerial photos paint a grim picture of Hurricane Helene’s devastation in parts of western North Carolina that have been hard to access after the storm swiped away the state’s roads and bridges. //
The storm threw down so much water over the southern Appalachians over a 3-day span that it was a widespread once-in-1,000 year rainfall event for the region, according the National Weather Service.
All of that water barreled down the mountains, liquifying the slopes in some places into devastating mudslides that wiped homes off their foundations. But eventually, it all ended up in rivers.
Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said.
The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene’s growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.
“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.
“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.
Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths in a different way than previous studies, opting for a more long-term public health and economics-oriented analysis of what’s called excess mortality. They looked at states’ death rates after 501 different storms hitting the United States between 1930 and 2015. And what they found is that after each storm there’s a “bump” in death rates.
It’s a statistical signature that they see over and over, Hsiang said. Similar analyses are done for heat waves and other health threats like pollution and disease, he said. They compare to pre-storm times and adjust for other factors that could be causing changes in death rates, he said. Complicating everything is that the same places keep getting hit by multiple storms so there are death bumps upon death bumps.
Just how storms contribute to people’s deaths after the immediate impact is something that needs further study, Hsiang said. But he theorized it includes the health effects of stress, changes in the environment including toxins, people not being able to afford health care and other necessities because of storm costs, infrastructure damage and government changes in spending.
“When someone dies a few years after a hurricane hit them, the cause will be recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the study but has done similar studies on heat and cold deaths. “The doctor can’t possibly know that a hurricane contributed/triggered the illness. You can only see it in a statistical analysis like this.”
Taxpayer-funded data locked behind insurance firm's paywall //
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cannot reveal weather forecasts from a particularly accurate hurricane prediction model to the public that pays for the American government agency – because of a deal with a private insurance risk firm.
The model at issue is called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) Corrected Consensus Approach (HCCA). In 2023, it was deemed in a National Hurricane Center (NHC) report [PDF] to be one of the two "best performers," the other being a model called IVCN (Intensity Variable Consensus).
Hurricane Helene is an unusual example of “conveyor belt” weather conditions, similar to those for Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Atlanta received a record 11.12 inches (28.24 centimeters) of rain in 48 hours, the most the city has seen in a two-day period since record keeping began in 1878, Georgia's Office of the State Climatologist said on the social platform X. The previous mark of 9.59 inches (24.36 cm) was set in 1886. Some neighborhoods were so badly flooded that only car roofs could be seen poking above the water.
68 °F above average is a lot. For a tropical country it is not credible for temperatures to be that much warmer than average because the average is too high to give enough headroom. So what gives?
Reading the article I found this:
parts of Malawi saw a maximum temperature of 43C (109F), compared with an average of nearly 25C (77F)
As I expected the actual temperature increase was 32 °F, not 68 °F. So what’s up with that headline? Here’s a hint: this is what the headline might say if you set your location to somewhere other than the United States:
Now “nearly 20C” is an odd way of saying “18 °C”, but I guess they really like round numbers, and that’s not the problem. The problem is that somebody – the localization team? an algorithm? – decided that 20 °C was equivalent to 68 °F. And they’re not wrong. And yet they are.
When converting from a temperature in Celsius to one in Fahrenheit you have to multiply by 1.8 (because each degree Celsius covers a range 1.8 times as large as a degree Fahrenheit) and you have to add 32 °F (because the freezing point in Fahrenheit is 32, compared to 0 in Celsius). However if you are converting a temperature difference you just multiply by 1.8. //
This is just another version of the fallacy involved when somebody says that it is “twice as hot” when the temperature goes from 5 °C to 10 °C – note that this is equivalent to going from 278 K to 283 K, or 41 °F to 50 °F, so clearly not “twice as hot” in any meaningful way.
Hurricane forecasters are bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. The Atlantic hurricane season was supposed to be epic. Instead, it's turned into a real dud.
Huge storms wreaking havoc on coastlines from Aruba to Long Island were supposed to line up in the Eastern Atlantic in June and hit us one at a time until late September. The damage was going to be historic and the TV coverage was going to give climate change fanatics plenty of air time to vent that "this is just a foretaste" of what's to come.
But something puzzling occurred on the way to hurricane Armageddon: not much has happened. The Atlantic Ocean has seen five named storms: two tropical storms, two hurricanes and one major hurricane this season. //
There's a lesson to be learned from the errors in hurricane forecasting. While we know a lot about the weather and how hurricanes form, what we don't know far exceeds our stored knowledge of how complex, chaotic systems behave to create deadly storms or a bright, sunny day.
It's a lesson that will go unlearned by many who could use that knowledge to realistically predict climate change.
Whatever the reason for the development of the Atlantic Niña this year, there is no climate emergency. //
Daniel Horowitz @RMConservative
·
Ocean is warming...no ocean is cooling!! But either way, it's your fault and we need to take your energy and food to reverse it
newscientist.com
Part of the Atlantic is cooling at record speed and nobody knows why
8:18 AM · Aug 23, 2024
It turns out the headline is not entirely…accurate. The temperature drop is part of a climate phenomenon known as the Atlantic Nodal Mode. The pattern is like the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño/La Niña cycles but more localized.
The natural climate pattern swings between cold and warm phases every few years. Sea surface temperatures (SST) in the eastern equatorial Atlantic have a somewhat surprising seasonal cycle. The warmest waters of the year occur in spring, while the coolest waters occur during the summer. //
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the developing Atlantic Niña is its potential impact on hurricane seasons. As hurricanes strengthen in warm waters and weaken in cool ones, this could be good news for Legal Insurrection fans along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard.
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"It's hard to communicate how unbelievable this is." //
Officially, of course, the Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1, But most years, the tropics remain fairly sleepy for the first month or two, allowing coastal residents to ease into the season.
Yes, a tropical storm might form here or a modest hurricane there. But the really big and powerful hurricanes, which develop from tropical waves in the central Atlantic and roar into the Caribbean Sea, do not spin up until August or September when seas reach their peak temperatures.
Not so this year, in which the Atlantic Ocean is boiling already. The seas in the main development region of the Atlantic have already reached temperatures not normally seen until August or September. This has led to the rapid intensification of Hurricane Beryl, which crashed through the Windward Islands on Monday and is now traversing the Caribbean Sea toward Jamaica.
Beryl is, to put it mildly, a freak storm.
It intensified on Monday night into a Category 5 hurricane, with sustained winds of 165 mph. Like other meteorologists, I had to check my calendar to verify that it really just was the first day of July. Remember, we're still in the traditionally "sleepy" part of hurricane season. Prior to Beryl, in more than a century of hurricane records, the earliest a Category 5 hurricane has ever developed in the Atlantic was July 16. That was Hurricane Emily, in 2005, the notorious hurricane season that delivered Katrina to New Orleans about a month later. //
For this year, forecasters have been consistently predicting a hyperactive season due to the combination of roasting sea surface temperatures and the onset of La Niña during the critical months of August, September, and October. That forecast seems to be right on track and will be of concern to all coastal residents in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands. If Beryl is smashing records from 2005 and 1933 already, we're in "this is fine" territory.
“Potentially catastrophic wind damage is expected where the core of Beryl moves through portions of the Windward Islands, with the highest risk of the core in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada,” the hurricane center said.
Beryl has put up some eyepopping numbers in recent days, with warm ocean water allowing it to quickly gain strength after becoming a tropical depression on Friday. When it blossomed into a Category 4 storm on Sunday, it became the first Atlantic hurricane ever to attain that status in June.
What is the Nenana Ice Classic?
The Ice Classic is Alaska's greatest guessing game!
In Nenana during1917 a group of engineers surveying for the Alaska Railroad bet $800 putting in their guesses when the river would break up. This fun little guessing game has turned into an incredible tradition that has now continued for over 100 years!
Buy and turn in your $3.00 ticket between February 1st and April 5th to be involved in this long running Alaskan tradition.
See current wind, weather, ocean, and pollution conditions, as forecast by supercomputers, on an interactive animated map. Updated every three
Before we go on, let's be clear: No, we cannot “blow up” tornadoes, just as we cannot “nuke” hurricanes. It’s too complex, not to mention the likelihood of collateral damage.
But in a theoretical world without risk to lives or property, could you do it? I still don’t think so. Noted storm chaser Reed Timmer posted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend that the “explosion changed the thermodynamic gradients dramatically within the vortex and blew up the Clausius-Clapeyron equation.”
The C-C equation relates saturation vapor pressure to temperature. What is saturation vapor pressure? Vapor pressure is basically just that: What is the pressure of the water vapor in the air? But at a given temperature, there’s a maximum amount of moisture the air can hold. That would give you the saturation vapor pressure. Using C-C, we can determine that as temperature increases, the saturation vapor pressure of the air increases exponentially. In other words, warm air can hold much more moisture than cold air, and the relationship is exponential.
What does this all mean? Theoretically (very theoretically), the heat released from an explosion within the condensation funnel of a tornado would lead to a dramatic increase in saturation vapor pressure, thus decreasing the humidity in the vicinity of the funnel. You’re not adding more moisture to the equation, so all you’re doing is increasing temperature and increasing the air’s capacity to hold water—exponentially. All else being equal, you’ve decreased humidity, and because the air is no longer saturated, the condensation funnel (which you see when the air is saturated) visually disappears.
If the condensation funnel is our visual cue of a tornado and it disappears, then to the human mind, the tornado itself has disappeared. So you can actually blow up a tornado, right? Not quite.
Biggest Earthquakes Near Monrovia, Montserrado, Liberia
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