2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

I wonder what the party affiliation and the death toll was for the people who were smart enough to evacuate?

 

Some people don't have the means or ability to evacuate, but for someone to claim they didn't know about it or waited for the government to tell them to evacuate is just natural selection.
The first mention of what would become Ian was posted here Sept. 19. It's not like a hundred years ago when you didn't know about a coming hurricane until your barometer dropped or you saw clouds on the horizon.

 

Hopefully these two are the last gasps of the season. The area off the Spanish Main could flare up with some tracks having it smashing Central America. TD 12 isn't much at the moment and hopefully won't be. It was originally tracked to hang a right and go up the middle of the Atlantic, but now it's curving south.

 

It's not so much ignorance to what's known, it's that every storm is different and for every Camille, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Charley and Michael there are 20 that just don't do as expected. Irma was supposed to be a monster, and in some areas it wasn't friendly at all, but the entry point of the storm to land was missed significantly (no one really could get a good track on it) and no one on earth thought the storm would completely break up and lose all of its structure upon landfall, scattering like an exploding bomb. Most hurricanes don't do anything like that.

Ian had tracking problems too, a major shift roughly 30 hours before landfall that understated. That southward was only thought to be about 30-35 miles from original forecast, which meant the direct path went from St. Petersburg to around Bradenton/Sarasota. The shift was actually closer to 100 miles, just south of Fort Myers so instead of that area getting the lesser destructive path south of the eyewall, it got the full brunt of everything.

Also the forecast still had Ian coming onto land as low-to-mid 3. Basically it was going to go through Cuba, get stronger out of the deep Gulf, but weaken a little and stabilize the closer it got to land. Even if history tells us usually the storm is a little stronger than forecast, that still has Ian coming onto land as a mid-grade Cat 3. The forecasters was very late in changing that to a low-end Cat 4. In actually it entered as a high-end Cat 4. I think honestly given the damage and storm surge, it should re-classified as a lower-to-mid Cat 5. And there's a massive difference between Cat 3 and a Cat 5 storm. It sounds weird but Floridians just generally don't fret over Cat 3 storms. If you are in a flood zone you go to a local friend's house that's on higher ground and booze up. I don't blame the forecasters for some of the mistakes. This storm was far bigger than the average hurricane we see so there were a lot of issues getting a good grip on it.

Irma was forecast to be a high-end Cat 4 possible Cat 5 when it got to land and that forecast came 3-4 days ahead of time and I can tell anyone that the West coast of Florida was pretty bare. People left in droves. You couldn't get a flight out of Tampa, St. Pete/Clearwater/Sarasota/Fort Myers/Naples three days before landfall. I-75 was switched to one-way heading North on both sides. Everyone that could leave, left. Fortunately Irma wasn't the beast it was expected to be. Unfortunately that increases skepticism of the person that doesn't really follow news or watch local news or read a newspaper in between their 12-hour binges on "90 Day Fiance".

In pointing out the mistakes, I will say the one thing forecaster got right from go was the storm surge and threat of rising waters. They said it would be extreme and it was. Problem is as much as a meterologist will hammer home that the surge is the most important danger in a big storm, people still think wind damage first. You would think by now people would wisen up and worry about the wind, but the storms are presented as if the powerful wind is the worst part and that's the not usually case....it's the flooding.

 

Complacency is the greatest danger in any natural disaster. When notified of a hurricane, the vast majority of Floridians put up some plywood, buy a case of bottled water and assume that's good enough. I thought Andrew was enough of a wake-up call, or at least Charley for that area, but a lot has changed in 18-30 years.

I hate it for the people who didn't have the means to evacuate, and even then public shelters were only 10 percent full. You could blame that on public officials perhaps not doing a better job of identifying and prioritizing their most marginalized citizenry and having a detailed plan to get those people to safer locations.

But there's no excuse for the people who did have options and chose to be stupid. If you were on Captiva, Sanibel or Pine Islands -- or living within a quarter-mile of the Gulf -- with any hurricane within 100 miles of your location, you're woefully ignorant.

Life doesn't give you many second chances.

 

Me: Looks like Fort Myers might be in the crosshairs.

To quote myself at maumann from Sept. 23, the earlier forecasts were fairly on target.
And yeah, the flooding is the main problem, and I hope it always is. My house is built at 9 feet above sea level, then add the 12-foot pilings. If flooding ever impacts it, the entire island is under water, and the new shoreline is many miles to the west.

 

A hurricane/tornado/cyclone/wildfire didn't do what was forecast. How unusual.

Nature plays by its own rules and generally always wins.

 

At one point fairly early it got forecast to land in Ft. Myers. Then the cone kept drifting up the coast, at one point as far north as around Cedar Key. Tampa Bay was in the crosshairs for a good while and even for the last few hours it looked like it was going to be North Port and Port Charlotte eating the eyewall. This is one of the bigger tracking misses in recent memory.

 

Two things not to mess with in the last week: Mother Nature and Mother F'n Ukrainians.

 

At one point it was all the way up to Port St. Joe and Apalachicola.

 

My ex-girlfriend's friend, Dr. Jyotika Virmani, is pretty brilliant and currently is the director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute. She does a Hurricane tracking blog purely for shits and giggles and she's probably a million times better at forecasting than anyone you'll see on TV. On her September 26 update she suggest that the storm was going to go east of where originally anticipated.

I'll plug it for those of us weather nerds who like reading about science and shit.

Jyotika's Tropical Storms Blog