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Saw this Bloomberg story today, and wondered what percentage of Floridians understand hurricane rapid intensification and the threat it posed to coastal areas.
In the 36 hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Ida's wind speed doubled, intensifying by 75 mph.
<<“It’s a known effect of climate change. Increasing ocean heat is causing strong hurricanes to become stronger,” said Greg Foltz, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....
Multiple studies have shown that rapid intensification has increased over the past three decades, pushing large storms to become even larger. In the 24 hours before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017, for example, its winds jumped from 90 mph to 130 mph — the difference between a Category One storm and a Category Four storm. In 2018, Hurricane Michael’s winds increased in speed by 45 mph in the last 24 hours before reaching in Florida.
The reason hurricanes are getting more powerful with such speed is no secret: warmer ocean water. “Surface temperatures in the Gulf now are about 0.5° Celsius to 1°C above the 1971 to 2000 mean,” said Foltz. “This gives more fuel to hurricanes and increases their wind speed limit.”>>
A deep eddy of very warm ocean water also contributed to Ida's rapid intensification. A map accompanying the article indicates that sub-surface sensors show that Florida is surrounded by very warm sub-surface ocean water. As a result, any hurricane making landfall in Florida this year likely will undergo rapid intensification.
<<Before hurricane season, Foltz said the floats in the Gulf were programmed to surface every 10 days to transit their data via satellite. NOAA then switched the program to every two days to create a more continuous flow of data for hurricane season.
This helped NOAA predict that Hurricane Ida would grow rapidly because forecasters could see that there was no cold water deep down beneath the storm that would get churned up and mix with warm surface waters. The Argo sensors also revealed that water in the storm’s path was predominately saline, another factor adding to intensification.>>
Hurricanes create an "upwelling" of ocean water, so warm subsurface water sustains hurricanes and provides the additional fuel for rapid intensification, according to the article.
Unless you are willing to sell your car/s, ride bikes everywhere, scrap your HVAC system in your house, & turn off the electricity forever, & stop buying Chinese stuff, you are as guilty of climate change as the rest of us.
You make all these lifestyle changes first, then I'll consider doing the same, & reading crazy long posts on the topic.
Until then, its just a darned Acorn Chicken Little. Next topic thread.
Never heard of a such a thing on spin jen. Lets get real here peeps. With a rapid warming planet and even hotter gulf water temps we will see super canes go past Cat5 down the road. The day will come Tampa will have to deal with a CAT5 with gust to 230mph.
What was the mean temp prior to 1971? Prior to 1856 when the Last Island storm hit Louisiana with the same levels of wind as Ida?
Other things we've learned: ocean water, including the Gulf of Mexico....is salty, which shows why the Argo sensors showed the water was predominately saline. Also, the process of upwelling is how hurricanes sustain themselves. Not new info here.
The Gulf is always warm this time of year, as is the water around Florida. The loop current and gulf stream see to that, as does geographic location. Hurricane strength runs in cycles and is a naturally occurring phenomenon. In short, this screed provided no new, real or meaningful insight.
This comment does NOT reflect the science as I understand it, even as quoted in the article in post 1: <<[Argo data] helped NOAA predict that Hurricane Ida would grow rapidly because forecasters could see that there was no cold water deep down beneath the storm that would get churned up and mix with warm surface waters.>> Upwelling of cold water actually would diminish a hurricane, as noted in the following discussion.
Before the Argo sensors, there was no easy way to know the sub-surface temperatures. "Nothing new" and "not new info here" are typical phrases used by persons eager to dismiss climate change.
Nothing new?
Actually, the NOAA's greatly improved forecasting of Hurricane Ida's rapid intensification did result from something new:
<<The supercharging of Hurricane Ida was less of a surprise than [2020's Hurricane] Laura’s, in part because of changes made to a network of floating ocean temperature sensors known as Argo, run by an international consortium of scientific agencies. This year, NOAA increased the frequency of reports from the Argo floats, to every two days instead of every 10. With more timely information, NOAA forecasters saw that Ida was headed toward a very warm blob of subsurface sea water. If the deep water in the path of a storm that’s churned up by surface winds is cold, it tends to reduce the storm’s power.>>
By successfully forecasting Ida's rapid intensification, perhaps for the first time in hurricane forecasting, the resulting evacuations perhaps saved many lives.
And the entire Argo project is new to the 21st century and is under constant improvement, as just noted.
<<However, until Argo began in 1999, the lack of both systematic worldwide observations of key factors that influence climate and the lack of accurate models that use observational data in climate forecasting made understanding and predicting these changes difficult.>>
The Bloomberg article is the first time that I learned of Argo sub-surface temperatures being incorporated successfully into an NOAA hurricane rapid intensification forecast. Please provide me with an earlier example. Even the following November 2020 article lamented the lack of sub-surface water temperatures available to hurricane forecasters, so increasing the frequency of Argo reporting in 2021 represents a major advance in hurricane intensity forecasting.
<<Heat stored in the ocean is energy that feeds storms. The warmer the water, the more energy is available for a storm to build strength. Winds from storms blow across the ocean and stir warm surface water with cooler water deeper down. The cooler the water rising to the surface, the less energy is delivered to the storm, which saps the storm’s strength. However, if the deeper water stirred to the surface is warm, it acts as fuel driving a storm’s intensity higher.
Scientists can easily measure the sea surface temperature (SST), but that provides no information about how much energy is stored below the surface.>>
<<However, errors related to forecasting hurricane (rapid) intensification show much less improvement, with pronounced spikes in the number of errors year to year, mostly because of the lack of data — particularly the ocean data below the surface....
Underwater gliders powered by batteries have been successfully used to collect data in support of hurricane forecasting. NOAA, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and academic partners deployed 30 gliders for the 2020 hurricane season. The fleet of gliders is expected to transmit 50% more data from the ocean compared to previous years.
That’s a great start, but to greatly improve the hurricane intensity forecast, we need to increase the subsurface ocean measurements by at least one order of magnitude, which can only be done with innovation with game-changing technology to power the Blue Economy.
One of the most ambitious efforts to gather subsurface data is Argo, an international program designed to build a global network of 4,000 free-floating sensors that gather information like temperature, salinity and current velocity in the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean.>>
It's also false to imply that hurricane strength runs in cycles. Measured ocean heat content and hurricane rapid intensification are increasing sequentially, with even greater devastation expected in the future.
From a 2018 article lamenting our inability to forecast rapid intensification of hurricanes:
<<In a 2016 paper, “Will Global Warming Make Hurricane Forecasting More Difficult?” (available here from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society), MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel explained that not only will global warming make the strongest hurricanes stronger, it will also increase how fast they intensify. Troublingly, intensification rates don’t increase linearly as the intensity of a storm increases--they increase by the square power of the intensity. Thus, we can expect future hurricanes to intensify at unprecedented rates, and the ones that happen to perform their rapid intensification just before landfall will be extremely dangerous.
Dr. Emanuel used a computer model that generated a set of 22,000 landfalling U.S. hurricanes during the recent climate period of 1979 - 2005, then compared their intensification rates to a similar set of hurricanes generated in the climate expected at the end of the 21st century. For the future climate, he assumed a business-as-usual approach to climate change—the path we are currently on. The analysis found that the odds of a hurricane intensifying by 70 mph or greater in the 24 hours just before landfall were about once every 100 years in the climate of the late 20th century. But in the climate of the year 2100, these odds increased to once every 5 - 10 years. What’s more, 24-hour pre-landfall intensifications of 115 mph or more—which were essentially nonexistent in the late 20th Century climate—occurred as often as once every 100 years by the year 2100. The major metropolitan areas most at risk for extreme intensification rates just before landfall included Houston, New Orleans, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Miami.>>
Ida's 75 mph rapid intensification level would top a listing of hurricane rapid intensification measurements listed in the Weather Underground article above.
Why do and others make inaccurate, UNSUBSTANTIATED statements about matters about which they obviously are ignorant???
This forum is riddled with inaccurate scientific claims about hurricanes.
High atmospheric water vapor content also contributes to hurricane rapid intensification, as does the absence of wind shear. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so atmospheric water vapor has increased with global warming.
<<What factors cause a storm to intensify rapidly?
First, it needs a substantial reservoir of energy in the ocean in the form of a deep layer of extra warm water. If that layer is shallow, it doesn’t contain sufficient energy to fuel rapid intensification. So the storm will deplete it quickly and not undergo intensification, especially a rapid one. The second need is for water vapor, which has been increasing over the past several decades because of the warming atmosphere and oceans. Warmer water evaporates more vapor into the air, and warmer air can hold more vapor. We’re already seeing about a 4 percent overall global average increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere since the mid-1990s. That water vapor literally contains the fuel that the storm uses to intensify itself. When that water vapor, a gas that you can’t see, condenses into clouds as it does in a storm, it releases a lot of heat. That increases the upward motions in the atmosphere that lead to the big thunderstorms of a tropical storm. Wind shear tends to rip apart those updrafts of hot air that are occurring because of the condensation of water vapor. And when those become tilted or are ripped apart, you don’t get the formation of the big thunderstorms that feed into the development of a tropical storm....
Sometimes the Loop Current forms a northward kink in the Gulf of Mexico, creating an eddy or pool of extra warm, deep water. It’s not an unusual occurrence, but when it does happen, and a tropical storm comes along and passes over it, it’s like giving the storm an energy drink. Energy plows into the storm from that pool of very warm water. That was the case in both Katrina and Ida.>>
What climate change deniers need to understand, or ADMIT, about the link between climate change and hurricane rapid intensification:
<<The ocean is absorbing about 90 percent of the heat that’s being trapped by the extra greenhouse gases that we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. So that is, all by itself, providing most of the ingredients needed for rapid intensification—just having that warm seawater, like a supercharged battery for storms, created by human-caused climate change.>>
Hurricane rapid intensification already has significantly impacted Florida's Panhandle in recent years -- 2018's Hurricane Michael and 2020's Hurricane Sally. It's only a matter of time before a rapidly intensified hurricane impacts a major Florida population center.
Increasing reports of a slowing Gulf Stream should increase the worry about hurricane rapid intensification in Florida. To any extent that the Gulf Stream slows, ocean heat content around Florida may increase significantly, resulting in even greater intensification.
<<The Gulf Stream — one of Earth's major climate-regulating ocean currents — is moving slower than it has in thousands of years, a new study suggests. Human-induced climate change is largely to blame.>>
Hurricane rapid intensification already has significantly impacted Florida's Panhandle in recent years -- 2018's Hurricane Michael and 2020's Hurricane Sally. It's only a matter of time before a rapidly intensified hurricane impacts a major Florida population center.
Increasing reports of a slowing Gulf Stream should increase the worry about hurricane rapid intensification in Florida. To any extent that the Gulf Stream slows, ocean heat content around Florida may increase significantly, resulting in even greater intensification.
<<The Gulf Stream — one of Earth's major climate-regulating ocean currents — is moving slower than it has in thousands of years, a new study suggests. Human-induced climate change is largely to blame.>>
What was the mean temp prior to 1971? Prior to 1856 when the Last Island storm hit Louisiana with the same levels of wind as Ida?
Other things we've learned: ocean water, including the Gulf of Mexico....is salty, which shows why the Argo sensors showed the water was predominately saline. Also, the process of upwelling is how hurricanes sustain themselves. Not new info here.
The Gulf is always warm this time of year, as is the water around Florida. The loop current and gulf stream see to that, as does geographic location. Hurricane strength runs in cycles and is a naturally occurring phenomenon. In short, this screed provided no new, real or meaningful insight.
And I bet there was an even stronger one before 1856, we just don't know about it.
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Slowing Gulf Stream
