Well that is just Effing scary. . .

[sereneorange]

Way to scare the poop out of me wunderground.com


Hurricane Ike's winds remain at Category 2 strength, but Ike is a freak storm with extreme destructive storm surge potential. Ike's pressure fell rapidly last night to 944 mb, but the hurricane did not respond to the pressure change by increasing its maximum winds in the eyewall. Instead, Ike responded by increasing the velocity of its winds away from the eyewall, over a huge stretch of the Gulf of Mexico . . . This very unusual structure makes forecasting the future intensity of Ike nearly impossible. The possibilities range from a Category 1 storm at landfall--as predicted by the HWRF model--to a Category 4 storm at landfall, as predicted by the GFDL. (note: The GFDL model is considered the most accurate over the past few years.)

Ike is now larger than Katrina was. . . Ike's huge wind field has put an extraordinarily large volume of ocean water in motion. When this swirling column of water hits the shallow waters of the Continental Shelf, it will be be forced up into a large storm surge which will probably rival the massive storm surge of Hurricane Carla of 1961. Like Carla. . . Ike will probably inundate a 180-mile stretch of Texas coast . . . with a 10-15 foot storm surge. . . The latest experimental storm surge forecast . . . shows a 10% chance that Ike's storm surge will exceed 15-21 feet at Galveston. The Galveston sea wall is 17 feet high, so it may get overtopped. (Note: the height of The sea wall is closer to 15-16 feet due to confusion between whether to measure against sea level or mean low tide.)

The amount of water Ike has put in motion is about 50% greater than what Katrina did, and thus we can expect Ike's storm surge damage will be similar to or greater than Katrina's. The way we can estimate this damage potential is to compute the total energy of Ike's surface winds (kinetic energy). Katrina and Wilma at their peaks both earned a 5.1 on this scale (Figure 2). At 9:30am EDT this morning, Ike earned a 5.6 on this scale, the highest kinetic energy of any Atlantic storm in the past 40 years.

We must assume Ike will intensify to a Category 3 hurricane by landfall, which would likely do $20-$30 billion in damage. The chances of hundreds of people being killed in this storm is high if people do not heed evacuation orders to leave low-lying areas threatened by high storm surges. Ike's storm surge is going to be affect a huge area and be tremendously destructive.

Comments

[purposefully.livejournal.com]

Re: Trees... child, that's my concern everytime it storms! And Hanna had me very concerned last weekend. Hmph.

[serene-orange.livejournal.com]

I bet she did. Nasty little witch