posted
[geek] After Beta, v.1 goes G.A. (general availability). Those darn early-adopters in Nicaragua. [/geek]
Posts: 431 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Once again the actual storm track shows interesting variations from each of the NHC's previous path predictions. By the path it is taking instead, Beta seems almost alive, and drawn to feed itself upon this trough of warm water off of southern Jamaica. With the roiling Caribbean waters also seeming to have a dance of their own.
Yeah, I'm waxing metaphoric. But complex dynamical systems need different descriptives than simple mechanisms.
posted
These are some awesome links, aspectre! The penultimate link is water temperature? Is the last link air temperature? What caused the slug of really cold (air, water, whatever) to appear out of nowhere in that last sequence?
I didn't realize all this stuff existed online. Did you find it by wandering around in the NOAA stuff?
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Probably could have gotten there that way. After having already found the AOML.NOAA site, I think I noticed a link from the NationalHurricaneCenter which leads (eventually) to the joint AtlanticOceanographicandMeterologicalLaboratory and NationalOceanic&AtmosphericAdministration project. But as I've said before, the NHC is one of the worst-designed sites for searching through. And there is no obviously-labeled link from either the NHC, the NOAA, or the AOML which leads there. There ain't even an obvious link from the AOML.NOAA homepage.
Assuming such a site had to exist since Rutgers had one on the Gulf of Mexico, I googled it up searching for similar information about the Caribbean. Which essentially brought up nothing except a couple of inactive sites with links which led nowhere. However, the addresses within those links did give clue as to other possibly useful keywords. In other words, I found the site through pure stubborness.
"Is the last link air temperature? What caused the slug of really cold (air, water, whatever) to appear out of nowhere...?"
The last link was daily time-lapse "photography" of SeaSurfaceTemperatures/SST of 10days with the last day being 26Oct05. If you are referring to the upwelling leading to the large darker blue SST where (click to enlarge) Belize, Guatamala, and Honduras meet, I would suspect that deep currents pushed sub20degreeCelcius/68degreeFahrenheit waters up the continental shelf through the 26degreeC/79degreeF"thermocline"* to the surface.
Posting now lest I accidentally delete.
* Quotation marked because I really mean the artificially-marked temperature cutoff between waters warm enough to strengthen tropical cyclones and the colder waters beneath, and not the true meaning of thermocline.
posted
I know they have a policy where if a named storm is destructive enough, they retire that name from the rotation and replace it with a new one. Does anyone know what happens if one of these greek letter storms causes a lot of destruction? For example, if Beta turns out to be a big one, will they skip from Alpha straight to Gamma next time? Or maybe replace Beta with the second letter of the Russian alphabet? It's an interesting question.
Posts: 45 | Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
If you look at the trajectories for Beta, it looks like this storm could possibly cross central America into the Pacific the way Stan did. It will need to gain either strength or momentum to travel that far across land without fizzling, but it is possibly.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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No, X would have been a Man's name and it never made it to a Hurricane. Perhaps "Tropical Storm Xavier".
This one would be a female name starting with Y,
Hurricane Yolanda.
The lists alternate between male and female names and rotate between English, Spanish and French names. I suspect they left Q, X, Y and Z off the list because they couldn't find enough male and female names in all three languages to complete the five years of lists. Plus, they never needed them before and they had a contingency plan if they did.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
It's not my fault. The fingers just type these things on their own.
I really should start proof reading my posts, but I probably won't. That's too much like work and I don't post here so I can do more work.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
Arghh. The last thing any part of Central America needs right now is another hurricane. And the stormtrack has it heading across Honduras to Guatemala which received the most damage from Hurricane Stan.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
Like I said, Tatiana and Rabbit one of the coolest things about the Internet is being able to easily share whatcha find.
"The penultimate link is water temperature?"
The ten-day time-lapse "photography" of the roiling Caribbean waters is of TropicalCycloneHeatPotential. Which I'm sure you've found the name of already. However, as you can see through comparison of the 25Oct05 charts on the TCHP and the SST, while there is some correlation between heat potential and surface temperature, they are not directly related.
A tighter correlation is found between the 25Oct05 chart showing how deeply that deeply that D26isotherm -- ie the water above D26 has temperatures above 26degreeC/79degreeC* -- extends beneath the surface. Which makes sense cuz as the winds churn the surface, they cause the warmer surface waters to mix with the cooler waters below; thus cooling the surface waters. So the deeper the sufficiently warm water extends below the surface, the longer a hurricane/etc can feed, gather more energy from that warm water before the windchurning cools it off too much.
But there is yet another correlation: that between the SurfaceHeightAnomoly/SHA and the TCHP. Since water is self-leveling, there has to be reason for variations above the mean sea-level. So the SHA shows the combination of the air-pressure above the ocean and the seawater density. Lower air-pressure "suck"s the water upward, and higher air-pressure weighs the water downward. And seawater density is affected by its temperature and the dissolved salts/etc contained within.
The lower the air-pressure, the lower the boiling point of water. eg It takes longer to cook a "five-minute" egg up in the mountains of Colorado than it does at nearly sea-level Florida because water boils at a cooler temperature at higher altitudes, and at a warmer temperature at low altitudes. Temperature is a statistical average of the individual kinetic energies of the molecules/atoms/etc which comprise the object being measured. ie At any given temperature, there exists some molecules/atoms/etc within the object which have individual kinetic energies higher than average, and some molecules/atoms/etc which have lower individual kinetic energies than the average. In liquid water, the individual molecules with the highest kinetic energies "boil" off, evaporate. And the lower the air-pressure, the faster those individual molecules evaporate. And so the water's average kinetic energy, temperature drops as the highest energy molecules evaporate.
Which is how the hurricane's low pressure feeds on the ocean's energy: evaporation of the "hot" water molecules increases the kinetic energy contained within the storm.
So the TCHP seems to be mostly derived from the mixture of the depth of sufficiently warm water (D26) and the air-pressure above that water (SHA). With surface temperature (SST) playing a lesser role.
* Temperature at which water is warm enough to strengthen a tropical storm or hurricane.
posted
BTW: I do know that you guys probably know the above already. So I really just used Tatiana's question to talk about the subject for other readers who might be interested.
quote:Originally posted by aspectre: BTW: I do know that you guys probably know the above already. So I really just used Tatiana's question to talk about the subject for other readers who might be interested.
aspectre, thanks! I did not know all this stuff already, and found it fascinating.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Last bit for the HurricaneBeta archive which has been sitting in an open window since landfall.
4amEST 30Oct05 : HurricaneBeta's center is located at Latitude13.0North : Longitude83.4West, ie ~8miles/13kilometres off the Nicaraguan coast, With maximum sustained wind of 115mph/185kph Beta is a CategoryThree hurricane, ie classified as a major hurricane.
As the center made its 7amEST 30Oct05 landfall at Latitude12.9North : Longitude83.5West, maximum sustained winds had already decreased to 105mph/169kph, CategoryTwo, and rapidly dropped to CategoryOne status of under 95mph/153kph as the outer eyewall cleared the ocean.
posted
Yep, the information is minimal: eg "refugees are still in the evacuation centers" and little more. Given that (storm track) HurricaneBeta's worst effects were on the MosquitoCoast -- ie the least Europeanized and poorest region -- and that winds had decreased to less than a tropical storm's minimum of 40mph/64kph by the time Beta hit the richest and most politically powerful regions, I'd be surprised if coverage in the Nicaraguan news media is much better.
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