Rita: Is Texas Screwed?


Rita has now outdone her older sister Katrina - 898 mb central pressure, the 3rd lowest ever for an Atlantic Hurricane. Galveston is very near the bullseye of her projected path. It also seems possible that Rita will stall out over Texas and dump up to 30 inches of rain.

Note the rapidly expanding wind field at right.

A conservative Republican scientist said to me today "It's got to be global warming."

The experts aren't convinced, but I find the storms a lot more suggestive than a cold winter day or two in Boston in Boston.

Comments

  1. j merlino10:03 PM

    I'm a conservative who is becoming more and more convinced everyday that something is up. Maybe the earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling, but more and more I believe it is more than just a "cycle."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Arun6:20 AM

    CIP, there is a hurricane cycle. Too early to implicate global warming.

    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2001/200109205219.html

    Their findings: The number of hurricanes making landfall in a given year is controlled not only by the long-term, multi-decade trend described in the Science article, but by three shorter-term cycles as well. These four distinct "temporal modes" - each probably the result of a different atmospheric and oceanic phenomenon - combine to determine the number of tropical storms that make landfall each year, Xie and Pietrafesa explain.

    "It's the short-term modes that have the most effect on the number of Atlantic tropical cyclones that make landfall each year," Xie said. "There's a danger if you don't look at all the modes, not just the longest-term mode."

    Pietrafesa adds that while the long-term cycle contributes about one or two tropical cyclones per year to the total, the shorter-term cycles typically contribute up to five in a given year for the entire North Atlantic, several of which hit the coast.

    ReplyDelete

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