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.

Position: 11.0N 30.0W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [290°] near 15 mph [24 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1008 mb.

Currently about 460 miles [740 km] Southwest of the southernmost Cape Verde Islands.

As Jose exists only as a low in the North Atlantic, the post-tropical remnants of Irene are dumping rain on Northeastern Canada. It is the start of the busy part of the hurricane season, and it looks like we will get to Alpha, Beta, etc. again this year. This is the same list of names that was used in 2005, with substitutions for the major storms, i.e. this storm will become Katia, not Katrina.

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.]