Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.
To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)
Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.
I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.
Helene is more deadly than Katrina if you don’t count the deaths after the boat broke the levee that was well beyond its lifespan in New Orleans, which you shouldn’t since that was a 100% fixable issue that was not taken care of.
We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.
It was definitely a man-made disaster when it came to New Orleans. I made this analogy to someone else: if lightning strikes a skyscraper and the skyscraper burns down and kills everyone inside due to a lack of a sprinkler system, is that really death by a natural cause? I would say it’s death by gross incompetence.
But we couldn’t have the poor corporation taking the responsibility for that. They’d never get their insurance pay out! And after all that work disabling the sprinkler system and installing extra metal antennae in the roof…
We don’t respect rivers enough. I would never live in a floodplain.
The real problem with “never live on a floodplain” is that you can’t know where the floodplains are. The flood maps are all based on historical rainfall data, and that data is now obsolete. Even worse, it won’t stabilize in our lifetimes. So we can’t just observe the next ten years of rainfall and plan around that. No, things are changing, and they will continue to change. You might think you don’t live on a 500 year floodplain. But the cold truth of it is, we no longer have any idea where the 500 year flood plains are anymore. You need decades of weather observations of a stable climate to come up with accurate flood maps. And we just don’t have that kind of reliable data anymore. Unless you happen to live on the top of a very tall hill, you really can’t be sure you don’t live in a flood zone of some sort or another.
I live on top of a hill that drains directly into the ocean. If my house floods I have different problems.
I also won’t live on the side of hills without a very clear understanding of the local watershed, soil stability, nearby land rights… I took a lot of Earth science classes and honestly it’s kinda traumatizing to peek behind the curtain. Shit is fucked.
What boat?
Well, it’s not over.
This is coming next week. Path is unclear, and its not as big as Helene, but anything near a 930mb in Tampa Bay and plowing over Orlando at 950mb, especially at this angle, is a catastrophe.
Katrina was 920mb at landfall, and these intensity forecasts have been undershooting hurricanes recently.
And there’s another low pressure system at the edge of the GFS that I don’t like, taking a similar path to Helene:
This is what the upcoming hurricane looked like a few days ago.
It’s clearly trying to help the US by amputating the injured limb.
Or take out Florida so it has a more open path to Texas.
I remember when conservatives were hooting and hollering about Climate Science Being Wrong, because the predicted “Worst hurricane season on record” wasn’t producing a record number of powerful storms.
Well… now what? I guess we can fall back to Gaetz and DeSantis blaming Biden for a bad cleanup job. Or go the MTG approach and start talking about HARP and the Jewish Space Lasers.
Eventually there won’t be any insurer’s left in those areas and most people will just abandon them. Of course the federal government will keep giving them flood insurance to rebuild over and over.
oh hey, all those east coasters can sell their worthless flooded houses to the west coast coasters selling their worthless burnt down houses fleeing the fires since no insurers will cover anywhere.
Then those people living along the Mississippi can sell their worthless houses to the people from new Orleans. It’s foolproof.
Aquaman: “On second thought I’ll fix climate change AFTER a few purchases.”
They will probably say “it’s just a hurricane, doesn’t prove anything”
Well… now what?
Years went by and Earth-destroying profits continued for all these years, again.
The goal was well defined, misinformation carefully funded, the results what they hoped for.Didn’t you know those space lasers heated up the atmosphere just over Republican counties, to maximize the damage there?
I would simply not live in a majority GOP county. Seems like they were victims of a personal choice.
What I don’t like about these graphics is there is no data source so you have to look it up to know how much to believe about what they say. So for those wondering, per Wikipedia:
-
Helene was a Cat 4, its max diameter was between 400-450 miles, max wind speed of 140 mph is correct. Known fatalities so far > 227 and counting.
-
Katrina was a Cat 5, 400 miles in diameter as shown, but with a max windspeed of 175 mph, not 125. For those too young to remember, Katrina was a very, very bad storm. So bad. Over 1392 fatalities (official estimate; exact number unknown). BTW Katrina also had a big tail/wing(?) stretching to the north when it hit land like what Helene had, but thinner since further west–but those don’t count as part of the measured diameter of the hurricane.
My opinion of this graphic: Hurricanes are getting worse because of climate change, but we don’t need to convince people of that by downplaying Katrina or making Helene look scarier–Helene is also very very bad. It’s all bad, folks.
Katrina photo:
This infuriates me so much. I am sitting here like a dumbass saying that this storm is worse than Katrina. Like I know I should do research before being confident in what I know but how many small infographics like this do we digest and then regurgitate a political opinion based off of them
Worse is a hard metric to analyze when comparing 2 different storms. One may have higher winds. Another might dump more rain. Another might have brought a high storm surge to an area that couldn’t handle it. Another might come in kinda mild and just stall, battering one area for a long time. One storm might do massively more damage if it hits Atlanta vs. Miami. I’ll forgive people for getting a little hyperbolic when describing a storm that has personally impacted them. Storms may hit a broad region, but the impact of a storm is always hyper local.
Katrina was a man made disaster. It would not have taken a tenth of the lives it did if the levees had been maintained.
According to wikipedia Katrina was only a cat 3 when it hit Louisiana. It did get up to a 5 at one point, but bot when it did most of it’s damage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
-
deleted by creator
Evidently they fucked themselves by voting against Gore, too.
deleted by creator
Not sure what the science is between 2 images with no source or timestamp and nearly 20 years of technological improvement between them is but this isn’t the peak of Katrina
Katrina ultimately reached its peak strength as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale on August 28. Its maximum sustained winds reached 175 mph (280 km/h) and its pressure fell to 902 mbar (hPa; 26.63 inHg), ranking it among the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.
It probably refers to its stats at landfall
Katrina weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall along the northern Gulf Coast, first in southeast Louisiana (sustained winds: 125mph) and then made landfall once more along the Mississippi Gulf Coast (sustained winds: 120mph). Katrina finally weakened below hurricane intensity late on August 29th over east central Mississippi.
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
[Katrina] is the costliest hurricane to ever hit the United States, surpassing the record previously held by Hurricane Andrew from 1992. In addition, Katrina is one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorological_history_of_Hurricane_Katrina
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
Only if you count what happened in New Orleans after the storm, which was an infrastructure issue, not a weather issue.
Why are you making this some type of competition?
I’m not. I’m explaining a difference.
What is the point of comparing Helene to Katrina? Harvey was also a 4.
Why discount the impact of Katrina just because there were systematic issues? It was a natural disaster and that was the impact.
Because it comes off to me like you’re trying to “well ackshully” about Helene being really the most devastating hurricane.
How am I discounting it? Please quote me discounting it.
It’s also good to remember that Katrina’s storm surge and the subsequent failure of the levees and flooding of the city is what was so damaging.
Besides the wind and rain the destruction of the levees took a huge toll on New Orleans.
As someone not from hurricane continent, these images are freaking scary. Like what do you mean the hurricanes are several times bigger than my entire country?
I’m just sitting here thinking holy hell I hope cyclones don’t come to my comfy corner of North-Eastern Europe
Wow, so according to MTG, I guess Democrat technology has really advanced over the past few years!
If that’s who she means by They.
I guess “They” could have been me. I am voting blue, hopefully I didn’t vote blew and accidentally summon Helene with my democrat science/leechcraft.
In case you didn’t get it, normally on the right “they” is a dog whistle for Jewish people. Especially coming from Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene.
Wimdy.
But the least wimdy going forward.
We gonna achieve such terrifying new records in just years!Helene looks like a thrice-divorced hurricane.
I think we’re just a few years away from the planetary cyclones in Day After Tomorrow.
I want someone to project that map onto a globe to illustrate how ridiculous it was. The elegantly circular arcs of the north sides of those storms would look bizarrely teardrop-pinched, if I’m not mistaken.
this can’t be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
This is like me comparing the joplin tornado to the el reno tornado.
(for those that don’t know the joplin tornado was an extremely erratic EF/F 5 tornado that was incredibly strong and just sort of showed up and then lingered over a particular area causing immense destruction, whereas el reno was a massive, very powerful tornado, that was collectively rated to be about an EF/F 3 i believe, although the core itself, and numerous shenanigans it pulled including sub vorticies or whatever the correct term is were much stronger, causing strong localized damage)
The different categories are the point. What they’re missing though is Helene was much closer to a category 5. It’s winds were 15 mph short of that category and the storm tail you can see in the above photo is characteristic of category 5 Hurricanes. That in and of itself isn’t a big deal. The big deal is that it’s the second storm at this strength this year. The first one stayed coastal where they’re used to all that rain.
What the picture is basically saying is Katrina was a warning shot. An actual Category 5 with winds well past 157 mph is going to hit the wrong spot and we’re all going to regret not taking climate change seriously.
going to
I don’t unpack my go bag anymore even though we only evacuate every sixth year or so. I’ve lived here 30 years and we’ve evacuated 4 times, will probably need to this year or next (fire season is almost over). Although, I’m calculating like it happens steadily, not taking into account the acceleration. 1996. 2007. 2017. 2020. uh, fuck. Now that I type that out, those last two are an awful “coincidence” and I need to go sit down.
Oof yeah. That wasn’t why we left the fire prone area we used to live in, but it sure didn’t hurt the decision to move.
The different categories are the point.
are they? storms are not like a magic black box that outputs a specific strength of storm, the point i’m making is that we should be comparing every storm we have since the beginning of recorded history and comparing them to what we’re seeing now, rather than taking one storm from like a decade ago, and comparing it to another now. This is a completely arbitrary description of climate change.
We’ve done that before. We’ve talked about how the heat has higher energy and water potential, we’ve talked about frequency of storms, of severe storms, of once rare phenomenon. This seems to grab people better.
and? It’s wrong. At least link to a source with relevant data or science on it. Shitposting and memes isn’t going to help.
Conservatives are literally pretending that biden isn’t giving places aid right now, after the hurricane, i don’t think this meme is going to stop that from happening lol.
It’s not wrong, the point just isn’t what you want it to be.
if the implied point of this post is to demonstrate that hurricanes have gotten worse over time due to climate change, yes this is objectively wrong, even if the underlying data is true.
Just because you have the correct solution, doesn’t mean you calculated it correctly.
To give an example here, let’s say i have a set of 99 numbers, 1-99 and lets say i add one more number, 100, but oops i accidentally add two more zeroes so now it’s actually 10,000
If i take an average of the extremes (not perfectly analogous here but i’m demonstrating a simple point) of 1, and 10,000 then the average is going to be 5,000 roughly. However most of those data points are going to live within 1-99 so this is an extremely incorrect “demonstration” of the effect here.
The primary problem here being that we don’t really know what the direct effects of climate change are going to be, just that we know what it will probably do, and if this is the first significant event of this category, we’re about to find out why fat fingering the 0 twice is going to be really unfortunate.
Now if the point is that “hurricane bigger than other hurricane lol” sure, but that’s a stupid point to make. Again my original example of joplin vs el reno tornados. It’s entirely arbitrary for no reason. It’d be like if i stopped you on the side of the road, picked up two rocks, and went “these sure are rocks aren’t they?”
this can’t be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
yeah but i don’t really see how that matters. Weather is extremely complicated, and unless hurricanes are a lot more consistent than i think they are, this is a lot like comparing two random tornados together, and then being surprised when one of them is a lot worse than the other.
If that’s what we’re doing we should compare the tri state tornado to any tornado in the last 10 years and suddenly tornados must be a lot less dangerous now than back when the tri state tornado hit.
It’s an entirely arbitrary mechanism of comparison. It’s just wrong.
Even if the point is trying to convey the difference between different storms, i can pick up two different rocks, they’re both different rocks. You can’t really glean something from 2 data points effectively.
Awesome, blatanly obvious misinformation.
W must be watching with popcorn
I see Yoda in the 2nd pic
