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Irma's Coming!

alfaniner said:
Latest breathless report (i.e. "BREAKING NEWS") --

"Hurricane Irma is now a Category 5. We'll tell you what that means for Puerto Rico and Florida after the break."

Oh, never mind about the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. Those aren't American territories.
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I have a friend in St. Maarten. Hope she's ok.
 
Possibly the reason a U.S. TV station wouldn't give weather reports affecting the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba is, the station has no viewers in those places? Btw, according to the National Hurricane Center the storm seems to be slowing down. It is now predicted to hit Florida late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.

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newyorkguy said:
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I think I got a ride home or I took the bus, in my area they may have been still running, and I made it home just as the trailing edge struck. Incredibly the local McDonald's was still open. I was in there getting coffee when the rain started again. The staff were laughing, saying they were all going to be swept away probably. I remember the asst. manager, a woman I had gotten to know pretty well (and who was friends with my wife), saying to me, "You're home early, did they let you go?" When I said yes she said, "I wish they'd let us go." She told me they were staying open, for one thing so city employees would have a place to get coffee and food.

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Waffle House IndexWP
The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.[1]
"If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That's really bad. That's when you go to work."[2]
The index has three levels, based on the extent of operations and service at the restaurant following a storm:[2][3]

  • GREEN: full menu - restaurant has power and damage is limited.
  • YELLOW: limited menu - no power or only power from a generator, or food supplies may be low.
  • RED: the restaurant is closed - indicating severe damage.
The term was coined by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate in May 2011, following the 2011 Joplin tornado; when the two Waffle House restaurants in the city remained open.[4][5]
The measure is based on the reputation of the Waffle House restaurant chain for staying open during extreme weather and for reopening quickly, albeit sometimes with a limited menu, after very severe weather events such as tornadoes or hurricanes. Waffle House, along with other chains, such as Home Depot, Walmart, and Lowe's, which do a significant proportion of their business in the southern US where there is a frequent risk of hurricanes, have good risk management and disaster preparedness. Because of this, and a cut-down menu prepared for times when there is no power or limited supplies, the Waffle House Index rarely reaches the red level.[4][2]
The Waffle House Index sits alongside more formal measures of wind, rainfall, and other weather information, such as the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale, which are used to indicate the intensity of a storm.[2]



On Thursday October 6th 2016, the index reached red when all Waffle House restaurants on Florida's I-95 between Titusville and Fort Pierce were closed. This was caused by Hurricane Matthew ravaging Caribbean islands and the east coast of the United States.[6]
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JoeBentley said:
Yeah although a 3-4 hour drive with our cranky old Calico in her cat carrier loudly vocalizing her disapproval the entire time and I might turn around and drive headfirst into the eyewall.
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Quite right, too! Got to keep up cat standards. Remember, they own you, not the other way round.
 
newyorkguy said:
I don't recall Matthew but Andrew was far from fizzling out. It was one of the worst storms to hit South Florida.
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My bad.

Matthew was pretty gruesome, too:

Hurricane Matthew was a powerful and devastating tropical cyclone which became the first Category 5 Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Felix in 2007. The thirteenth named storm, fifth hurricane and second major hurricane of the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season, Matthew wrought widespread destruction and catastrophic loss of life during its journey across the Western Atlantic, including parts of Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, the Lucayan Archipelago, the southeastern United States, and the Canadian Maritimes.

A total of 603 deaths have been attributed to the storm, including 546 in Haiti, 47 in the United States, 4 in Cuba, 4 in the Dominican Republic, 1 in Colombia, and 1 in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, making it the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Stan in 2005, which killed 1,600 in Central America. With the storm causing damages estimated in excess of US$15 billion, it was also the most destructive Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, as well as the ninth-costliest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history.
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I think I got a ride home or I took the bus, in my area they may have been still running, and I made it home just as the trailing edge struck. Incredibly the local McDonald's was still open. I was in there getting coffee when the rain started again. The staff were laughing, saying they were all going to be swept away probably. I remember the asst. manager, a woman I had gotten to know pretty well (and who was friends with my wife), saying to me, "You're home early, did they let you go?" When I said yes she said, "I wish they'd let us go." She told me they were staying open, for one thing so city employees would have a place to get coffee and food.
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They weren't willingly staying open out of a magnanimous willingness to serve unfortunate city employees. They were staying open because the corporate office will not allow the restaurant to close if it has power, water, and no damage, regardless of other circumstances.

I worked at a McDonald's in Ohio during a rare blizzard in the 00's. The location was at a collection of large shopping plazas where a state route met the Interstate. Every single establishment, restaurant, and gas station there closed early in preparation for the incoming blizzard, but not us - not even after the snow was so bad that the county sheriff's department had closed the road and many nearby ones. The blizzard came around 9:30; the restaurant closed at midnight. I was nearly stranded in deep snow halfway home when my car engine quit in the middle of what on any other day was a busy four-lane state highway.
 
Tropical storm Jose has formed in the equatorial Atlantic. If it threatens the US, there's a "Trump, wall, DACA, dreamers, immigrants" joke just waiting to be crafted.
 
Argumemnon said:
Man, Americans can't catch a break. Up here all we have to deal with is cold.
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We've had a break. We've had a good 10 years or so since Katrina with almost nothing in the way of hurricanes (in spite of prognostications there'd be tons right after Katrina -- any good skeptic could predict those predictions were BS thanks to regression to the mean, and I did so at the time, and saved off web pages of predictions, which I then deleted because now these predictions are tracked.)


One can make a much more solid prediction that every hurricane will be exaggerated at the feet of AGW rather than the reality that a few percent increase in temperature yields a few extra hurricanes every century and a few percent stronger on average. Not a sudden massive increase in every-500-year storms.

Feel free to write down my predictions.


And none of this matters because in a hundred years (barring a collapse of civilization at the hands of dictators and over-regulators) we'll all be uploaded into computers and living the life of Reilly. Even my "complete Trantorization of Earth" will be meaningless.
 
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Beerina said:
We've had a break. We've had a good 10 years or so since Katrina with almost nothing in the way of hurricanes (in spite of prognostications there'd be tons right after Katrina -- any good skeptic could predict those predictions were BS thanks to regression to the mean, and I did so at the time, and saved off web pages of predictions, which I then deleted because now these predictions are tracked.)


One can make a much more solid prediction that every hurricane will be exaggerated at the feet of AGW rather than the reality that a few percent increase in temperature yields a few extra hurricanes every century and a few percent stronger on average. Not a sudden massive increase in every-500-year storms.

Feel free to write down my predictions.


And none of this matters because in a hundred years (barring a collapse of civilization at the hands of dictators and over-regulators) we'll all be uploaded into computers and living the life of Reilly. Even my "complete Trantorization of Earth" will be meaningless.
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NoahFence said:
You may want to research that.
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I think that's what happens when you try to shoe-horn facts to fit an agenda.

Going backwards.... banner years for the Atlantic season in

2016, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2008. So, yeah, other than those years it's all bit a lot of doomsayers and CCH (Climate Change Hippies).

In fact, Beerina may be confusing the "OMG can New Orleans Take Another Hit" headlines before Rita made landfall to the east. Rita, did a shed load of damage; people along the Mississippi Gulf Coast lost everything. The construction codes have had to be changed because those once-in-a-hundred years storms, well, they do happen and it turns out that building cracker boxes two hundred yards off the shore line isn't such a good idea.

There were two additional Cat. 5 hurricanes after Katrina. They didn't devastate a major metropolis so it's easy to say "Oh pshaw, another one that didn't hit!" Tell that to the folks in Gulfport or the Yucatan, though.
 
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It looks like it's going to hit Puerto Rico full force. It won't lose much strength over the islands before it gets there, but worse... The Dominican Republic and Haiti are going to get it again, possibly a massive hit. It's still a slow-moving storm, though, and could get pushed north a bit and have a less-devastating near miss on Hispaniola. (Which would be the folks I'd worry most about.)
 
NoahFence said:
You may want to research that.
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I took the liberty of doing a little research myself. It appears that Beerina is correct. Based on the linked chart the past 10 years have been boringly average in regards to Atlantic cyclonic storms. There appears to have been no major hurricanes in the US over that period.

Interesting and surprising to me from that chart is that the accumulated cyclone energy averaged over the last decade is almost the same as the average over the entire chart since 1851 (arithmetic done in my head so not completely accurate). On the face of it this appears to mean that the energy of cyclonic storms in total is not increasing as much as is generally thought.

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html
 
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Foolmewunz said:
I always wondered why they didn't name blizzards or winter storms. When I tell people I survived that really bad blizzard in what was it? '71? I have to remember "the blizzard of '71". How much easier to remember Blizzard Mirielle? Actually you could name it after persons or events of that year. Hurricane Dryden. ('71 was the big winter and was the year that Ken stepped into the nets in the Forum)
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I suspect it's because blizzards simply aren't as well-formed as hurricanes/tropical storms are - instead of formed eyes, expected wind patterns, and so on, it's just a bunch of precipitation and maybe wind.

(Doesn't mean people don't come up with names for blizzards on their own - my fave's still Snowtorious B.I.G.)
 
Steve said:
I took the liberty of doing a little research myself. It appears that Beerina is correct. Based on the linked chart the past 10 years have been boringly average in regards to Atlantic cyclonic storms. There appears to have been no major hurricanes in the US over that period.

Interesting and surprising to me from that chart is that the accumulated cyclone energy averaged over the last decade is almost the same as the average over the entire chart since 1851 (arithmetic done in my head so not completely accurate). On the face of it this appears to mean that the energy of cyclonic storms in total is not increasing as much as is generally thought.

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html
Click to expand...

Link doesn't work.
 
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