Hurricane Hype?

A lot of people, including Duncan have been hearing complaints that Irene was over-hyped, apparently because there weren’t bodies in the streets of Manhattan, or some such silliness. As McClatchy pointed out: Irene wasn’t overhyped for rural areas on East Coast.

Dr. Masters demonstrates that the track forecast was extremely accurate, which saves a great deal of money. Not that long ago Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina would have had to expend money and effort on a storm that didn’t come.

The current weakness in the forecasting is the intensity forecast. I mentioned it in my posts, that the central pressure just didn’t correspond with the windspeed. Tropical storms don’t have pressures in the 950s, they should be in the higher 990s.

What happened to Irene was the eye wall replacement cycle that occurred while it was still the Bahamas. It pulled in dry air, and that should have really weakened it, as it left the eye wall with a gap in it. That didn’t happen, and there doesn’t seem to be a firm answer as to why. Perhaps massive storms operate under different rules than normal tropical storms, but there isn’t enough data to know that. Irene seemed to operate on sheer inertia after that point. It didn’t intensify, but it took forever to finally begin to spin down.

The reality is, if Irene had shifted 40 miles to the West at landfall in New York, the effect on the city would have been much worse. NYC received the ‘nice’ eastern side of the storm.

It takes time to move people in a semi-orderly fashion, and when you are talking about hundreds of thousands, or millions in the case of NYC, you can’t wait until the last minute. The tropical warnings used to be issued 24 hours before possible landfall, but they have been extended to 36 hours to give people more time to prepare.

The storm’s name will probably be retired as it will rank in the top dozen of tropical storms for damage, and there have been around 4 dozen deaths attributed to the storm. The vast majority of the damage, as with all tropical storms, will be the result of flooding, not the winds. As Dr. Masters noted: Irene’s 1-in-100 year rains trigger deadly flooding. Irene will enter the records of states for the most rain in a 24 hour period, and the highest crest on multiple rivers and streams.