Once again BP has had to admit it has been lying to the public, as the Pensacola News Journal reports: Oil spill: BP reverses, admits there’s oil in local waters

Despite persistent denials from BP last week, thousands of pounds of weathered oil is being pulled from under the surface of Pensacola Bay every day.

During more than a dozen interviews last week, BP officials and spokespeople for a number of government agencies working on the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill response denied knowledge of oil in the bay.

Even as they spoke, however, Escambia County officials and local fishermen were reporting finding weathered oil, as they’ve been doing for weeks. BP’s own crews were hand-scooping it up, and a submerged-oil team from BP’s Deepwater Horizon Response Incident Command Post in Mobile was investigating.

“BP says it’s all gone, but it’s not. I’ve known it was out there for a month,” said a commercial fisherman who asked not to be identified because he is working for BP in the cleanup and feared losing his job.

It’s bad enough that corporations lie to the public, but the Obama administration meekly follows their lead and backs up what ever fantasy BP is trying to sell. People along the coast know there is oil on the bottom just off shore, and we knew before the research ships came upon it. There are fishermen, surfers, and scuba divers all reporting that the oil is there. If you wade out into the Gulf deep enough you will step in it.

Position: 17.9N 61.1W [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [285°] near 15 mph [24 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 100 mph [160 kph].
Wind Gusts: 120 mph [190 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 175 miles [280 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 45 miles [ 75 km].
Minimum central pressure: 971 mb ↓.

Currently about 50 miles [ 80 km] East of Barbuda.

Barbuda should be experiencing hurricane force winds shortly as the eye passes just North of the island.

A Hurricane Warning is in effect for Saint Martin, Saint Barthelemy, Antigua, Barbuda, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius.

A Hurricane Watch is in effect for US Virgin Islands, and for the islands of Culebra and Vieques.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for US Virgin Islands, and for the islands of Culebra and Vieques.

[Note that “Warning” is a probable event, while “Watch” is possible, i.e. the Virgin Islands will probably have Tropical Storm conditions, but may have Hurricane conditions.]

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Position: 39.3N 53.0W [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Northeast [045°] near 16 mph [26 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 80 mph [130 kph].
Wind Gusts: 95 mph [155 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 310 miles [500 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 85 miles [140 km].
Minimum central pressure: 980 mb ↑.

Currently about 510 miles [ 825 km] South of Cape Race, Newfoundland.

The storm is weakening and slowing its forward speed as it moves across the North Atlantic.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

It wasn’t the storm, it was the levees.

It wasn’t Nature, it was man.

The Weather Underground’s Hurricane Katrina tracking map.

An animation of the National Hurricane Center’s tracking maps. If you stop the animation and step to frame 13 you will see that they had Katrina coming to my house for a while.

The track on Google map from the Central Florida Hurricane Center so you can see exactly where the storm struck, and it wasn’t New Orleans.

Katrina did have top sustained winds of 175 mph with a pressure of 902 millibars, a Category 5 storm, but that was in the central Gulf of Mexico. It came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane to the East of New Orleans. There was minimal wind damage in the city from the hurricane.

Wikipedia has a nice article on Katrina, without going totally technical on the science behind hurricanes.