Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.
To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)
Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.
I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.
What surprised me most about Helene was the ground speed. I don’t remember seeing any hurricane make landfall in the US moving at over 20mph. As a casual observer I have anyways seen 12 mph as a quick storm and 6 mph as slow.
Yeah, I’ve lived in New Orleans or on the East Coast my whole life and don’t recall that sort of movement speed. Usually, you want a fast moving storm so no one area takes on all the rain but Helene was going so fast and was so massive that it’s probably unprecedented.
Helene is more deadly than Katrina if you don’t count the deaths after the boat broke the levee that was well beyond its lifespan in New Orleans, which you shouldn’t since that was a 100% fixable issue that was not taken care of.
We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.
It was definitely a man-made disaster when it came to New Orleans. I made this analogy to someone else: if lightning strikes a skyscraper and the skyscraper burns down and kills everyone inside due to a lack of a sprinkler system, is that really death by a natural cause? I would say it’s death by gross incompetence.
But we couldn’t have the poor corporation taking the responsibility for that. They’d never get their insurance pay out! And after all that work disabling the sprinkler system and installing extra metal antennae in the roof…
We don’t respect rivers enough. I would never live in a floodplain.
The real problem with “never live on a floodplain” is that you can’t know where the floodplains are. The flood maps are all based on historical rainfall data, and that data is now obsolete. Even worse, it won’t stabilize in our lifetimes. So we can’t just observe the next ten years of rainfall and plan around that. No, things are changing, and they will continue to change. You might think you don’t live on a 500 year floodplain. But the cold truth of it is, we no longer have any idea where the 500 year flood plains are anymore. You need decades of weather observations of a stable climate to come up with accurate flood maps. And we just don’t have that kind of reliable data anymore. Unless you happen to live on the top of a very tall hill, you really can’t be sure you don’t live in a flood zone of some sort or another.
I live on top of a hill that drains directly into the ocean. If my house floods I have different problems.
I also won’t live on the side of hills without a very clear understanding of the local watershed, soil stability, nearby land rights… I took a lot of Earth science classes and honestly it’s kinda traumatizing to peek behind the curtain. Shit is fucked.
Good news! It’s gonna get worse! Much, much worse! Say thank you to petrol states and companies, preferably by blowing up their infrastructure
And a big thank you to politicians blocking major efforts to reduce carbon emissions thanks to lobbying by the industry and foreign governments.
The world finally needs to stop politicans getting huge donations and hold them accountable for their actions.
And also acting like “climate change” is a taboo topic that should never be spoken over the air, lest you offend someone.
It boils my blood that Republicans would blame Democrats for not sending enough aide during these times, all the while Republicans vote against initiatives drafted up by Democrats to combat these issues specifically.
They use issues like this entirely to rouse their base and keep their support.
But they brought a snowball into Congress and everything so obviously climate change is fake news!
Anything and everything for money… I wonder if they’ll take cash in hell?
Alright so we’re going to change how we vote, right folks? Green New Deal or they are literally selling us out.
You should read Ministry for the Future. It’s about how people cope with the world after the effects of climate change get out of hand. It’s sobering.
The idea of just blowing up the offending petrol infrastructure made me think of it.
Are these pictures even on the same zoom level?
You are correct, they don’t appear to be. This one seems more accurate there, but the difference is still stark:
I was going to correct you on the comparison and I tried making my own scaled image … but I couldn’t because yours is a correct scale
I just couldn’t believe that Helene was that massive and widespread compared to Katrina which was known as a major event. wow
I did one too. Top and bottom before I saw yours. Here it is as well to help with the scale. I overlaid them in Photoshop to help get the land the same but hell its nuts.
They are not, but I think the main focus is on how obscenely tall Helene was. There’s many parts of the US that weren’t prepared because they didn’t think it would reach them
There were warnings for Georgia and the southern Appalachia, but the storm moved so much faster at the end and carried so much water inland. The ability to hold more water in the atmosphere has been an ongoing concern from climate scientists, and this is a clear example of how it can lead to disaster.
This bundled with droughts that cause the ground to not be able to absorb the water, causing serious flash floods, is just a start. I’m guessing in the next ten years, we’ll see this happening more and more each year for inland areas
We even got some excessive wind in Chicagoland, which was obviously from the hurricane, because it was coming from the east. Normally, the wind here comes from the west.
Reminds me of youtuber LGR’s latest video, he didn’t prepare much because the storms don’t normally reach that far inland, and unfortunately he had a lot of his collection damaged because 2 massive trees sliced his house clean in half. Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
We have our own shit show of extreme weather. For example, derechos (an oceanless, inland hurricane essentially) used to be rare. We’ve had 2 massive ones in the last 4 years. This summer alone there were hundreds of tornados hitting places that rarely ever see them. Hell, it’s god damn October and we’re still having ~90°F days, which hardly ever used to happen.
In nebraska here under a Red Flag warning and a high of 91 today
EDIT : Correction, forecast updated with a high of 102… in fucking october. Holy shit
Hell, I think northern Nebraska had widespread, massive flooding a few years ago due to extreme weather causing one of the dams to fail. Wiped out several communities.
We got one of those out of place tornadoes this year! My town had one set down basically in the middle. We lost so many huge old (50-150+ year old) trees because that just doesn’t happen here. And because it doesn’t happen here, and some of the trees were planted well before the roads were built (meaning a lot of the trees that came down were basically in the road, curbs built around them sort of thing), it really did a number on the infrastructure (to say nothing of the damage to homes and stuff).
But in addition to a random tornado, we’ve just had a ton more super strong wind/rain events that cause damage in the last few years. I honestly don’t blame my neighbors for taking down their big old trees rather than deal with the weather damage. (I disagree with it, but I understand it)
Texas had a derecho go from Central Texas to the coast, which is the opposite of how weather is supposed to work here.
We don’t have winter in Chicagoland anymore. We have Spring, Summer, Fall, and Polar Vortex. Stays around 30-40 until mid January or early February and then get -20 for two weeks.
Are you in Tennessee? Because that sounds like the last four years here.
Not super far from there (~6 hours), WNW Illinois.
If you are ever fortunate enough to pay off your house DO NOT go without insurance because you can
Pretty much all home insurance doesn’t cover hurricane related damages if you’re on the east side of the US.
In some parts of Australia you cannot insure your home any longer due to climate change.
Florida and California are getting like that in the US. The lawyers and public adjusters are contributing to the problem by suing and shaking down every insurance company that stays in the state. In California they are begging them to stay…
Parts of Massachusetts are like that as well. As far as I know, flood insurance basically no longer exists on Cape Cod.
I wonder how deep inland hurricanes will affect the production of tornadoes up here (for good or ill).
Tornados seems to be moving eastward, so really the worst of the weather so far is hitting that side of the US
Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
Unless they move near one of the great lakes or a big river, it will be unsustainable. Most areas without those get their water from underground aquifers, which are getting depleted already. These little towns and cities that dot the flyover states aren’t preparing for this at all.
Wasn’t a big part of Katrina’s destruction from the hurricane effectively stalling over the southern US which caused prolonged and massive local damage?
Not trying to discount either event, mostly worried about the time we get a stalled Helene sized hurricane
A stalled hurricane doesn’t have to be large. Fran is an example back in history, and Harvey in more recent. But stalled storms also has its origin from climate change, because the weather steering systems are broken and cause/allow it.
It was ridiculously huge. I’m in Orlando, and when we were getting the first bands of wind, the eye of the storm was still over the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico
Well, it’s not over.
This is coming next week. Path is unclear, and its not as big as Helene, but anything near a 930mb in Tampa Bay and plowing over Orlando at 950mb, especially at this angle, is a catastrophe.
Katrina was 920mb at landfall, and these intensity forecasts have been undershooting hurricanes recently.
And there’s another low pressure system at the edge of the GFS that I don’t like, taking a similar path to Helene:
This is what the upcoming hurricane looked like a few days ago.
It’s clearly trying to help the US by amputating the injured limb.
Or take out Florida so it has a more open path to Texas.
I remember when conservatives were hooting and hollering about Climate Science Being Wrong, because the predicted “Worst hurricane season on record” wasn’t producing a record number of powerful storms.
Well… now what? I guess we can fall back to Gaetz and DeSantis blaming Biden for a bad cleanup job. Or go the MTG approach and start talking about HARP and the Jewish Space Lasers.
Well… now what?
Years went by and Earth-destroying profits continued for all these years, again.
The goal was well defined, misinformation carefully funded, the results what they hoped for.Eventually there won’t be any insurer’s left in those areas and most people will just abandon them. Of course the federal government will keep giving them flood insurance to rebuild over and over.
oh hey, all those east coasters can sell their worthless flooded houses to the west coast coasters selling their worthless burnt down houses fleeing the fires since no insurers will cover anywhere.
Then those people living along the Mississippi can sell their worthless houses to the people from new Orleans. It’s foolproof.
Aquaman: “On second thought I’ll fix climate change AFTER a few purchases.”
They will probably say “it’s just a hurricane, doesn’t prove anything”
Climate deniers can never be dissuaded from their idiot beliefs by science, because they are already ignoring science to these beliefs in the first place.
I’ve always liked the phrasing “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”.
Didn’t you know those space lasers heated up the atmosphere just over Republican counties, to maximize the damage there?
I would simply not live in a majority GOP county. Seems like they were victims of a personal choice.
As with everything, it also matters where it hits.
Katrina and New Orleans’s levees was a big deal. Helene flooding areas many moles from the coast in high altitude areas.
There have been bigger hurricanes that do less damage and likely there will be future weaker ones that do more.
I too worry about the poor moles getting flooded!!
Mathew and Hugo were pretty horrific.
What I don’t like about these graphics is there is no data source so you have to look it up to know how much to believe about what they say. So for those wondering, per Wikipedia:
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Helene was a Cat 4, its max diameter was between 400-450 miles, max wind speed of 140 mph is correct. Known fatalities so far > 227 and counting.
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Katrina was a Cat 5, 400 miles in diameter as shown, but with a max windspeed of 175 mph, not 125. For those too young to remember, Katrina was a very, very bad storm. So bad. Over 1392 fatalities (official estimate; exact number unknown). BTW Katrina also had a big tail/wing(?) stretching to the north when it hit land like what Helene had, but thinner since further west–but those don’t count as part of the measured diameter of the hurricane.
My opinion of this graphic: Hurricanes are getting worse because of climate change, but we don’t need to convince people of that by downplaying Katrina or making Helene look scarier–Helene is also very very bad. It’s all bad, folks.
Katrina photo:
Katrina was a man made disaster. It would not have taken a tenth of the lives it did if the levees had been maintained.
According to wikipedia Katrina was only a cat 3 when it hit Louisiana. It did get up to a 5 at one point, but bot when it did most of it’s damage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
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Evidently they fucked themselves by voting against Gore, too.
Maybe Florida voted majority against gore, we will likely never know
Oh, we know.
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Not sure what the science is between 2 images with no source or timestamp and nearly 20 years of technological improvement between them is but this isn’t the peak of Katrina
Katrina ultimately reached its peak strength as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale on August 28. Its maximum sustained winds reached 175 mph (280 km/h) and its pressure fell to 902 mbar (hPa; 26.63 inHg), ranking it among the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.
It probably refers to its stats at landfall
Katrina weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall along the northern Gulf Coast, first in southeast Louisiana (sustained winds: 125mph) and then made landfall once more along the Mississippi Gulf Coast (sustained winds: 120mph). Katrina finally weakened below hurricane intensity late on August 29th over east central Mississippi.
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
[Katrina] is the costliest hurricane to ever hit the United States, surpassing the record previously held by Hurricane Andrew from 1992. In addition, Katrina is one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorological_history_of_Hurricane_Katrina
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
Only if you count what happened in New Orleans after the storm, which was an infrastructure issue, not a weather issue.
Why are you making this some type of competition?
I’m not. I’m explaining a difference.
What is the point of comparing Helene to Katrina? Harvey was also a 4.
Why discount the impact of Katrina just because there were systematic issues? It was a natural disaster and that was the impact.
Because it comes off to me like you’re trying to “well ackshully” about Helene being really the most devastating hurricane.
How am I discounting it? Please quote me discounting it.
You’re splitting hairs.
No I am not. Those deaths were not the result of a natural disaster. The levee break was both predicted for years and preventable if the funds were just spent on it. Those deaths were directly the result of government incompetence.
So are you not going to count deaths from Helene resulting from people not evacuating properly? For not taking it seriously because it was preventable?
Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties. You understand that, right?
If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?
Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties.
There’s a systemic criticism here; people not evacuating Helene properly demonstrates we don’t have proper systems in place to facilitate evacuations in the case of a hurricane.
Someone who chooses not to evacuate because they didn’t understand the severity or don’t have a car or anywhere to go isn’t an individual choice.
I notice you didn’t answer my question. I will ask it again:
If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?
“Not evacuating properly”? Plenty of the people who died had no idea the storm was going to be as bad as it was when they were hundreds of miles inland in an area that had never had significant flooding.
I’m not saying any or all were preventable, only that OP is cherry picking out one single part of a catastrophe to tweak stats without fairly considering the removal of similar causes from the other event.
Where will poor people go and how would they afford to go and how would they get there?
It’s the same for either hurricane
It’s also good to remember that Katrina’s storm surge and the subsequent failure of the levees and flooding of the city is what was so damaging.
Besides the wind and rain the destruction of the levees took a huge toll on New Orleans.
The next storm?
Is that a real image?
It’s a real screenshot from 2004’s banger The Day After Tomorrow.
Hate how people are downvoting this guy just for asking a question, like what is this, reddit?
I wouldn’t worry about it. There’s a very sad person who tries to downvote all of my posts on a regular basis.
I call that the validation downvote. Just means the federation is still working.
Why would a satellite actually imaging storms want to place a satellite in the image as well?
I think its from some movie, like “the Day after Tomorrow” or something.
Because in movies you can have a shot of a satellite while showing a shot of the storm. I think that’s fairly harder to do in real life, seeing you’d have to have two satellites perfectly in sync (and they go pretty fast) or a satellite (space stations are satellites as well) with a very long selfie stick.
Edit actually yah googled “the day after tomorrow storm” and this was one of the first images to pop up, the exact same image https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/scale_862/public/2022/12/storm.jpg
I’ve seen ISS photos that have bits of the ISS in the shot. 🤷♂️
But also, I did some searching and no, that is not Hurricane Milton.
Oh yeah there’s shots like that. But like, in general. I don’t know just made me think of the day after tomorrow and yes it’s was that.
I googled "the day after tomorrow storm " and it was one of the first image https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/scale_862/public/2022/12/storm.jpg
So must’ve been in my subconscious or smth
Geostorm. Fun enough throwaway Gerard Butler movie.
Absolutely hilarious in the most unintentional way.
I feel like those words could be used to describe most of his movies (though obviously some are better than others, I’d even go so far as call a couple of them pretty good)
Wow, so according to MTG, I guess Democrat technology has really advanced over the past few years!
If that’s who she means by They.
I guess “They” could have been me. I am voting blue, hopefully I didn’t vote blew and accidentally summon Helene with my democrat science/leechcraft.
In case you didn’t get it, normally on the right “they” is a dog whistle for Jewish people. Especially coming from Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene.
Not necessarily. They might just be able to choose the strength at will and decided not to start out with the max output back with Katrina.
Wimdy.
But the least wimdy going forward.
We gonna achieve such terrifying new records in just years!As someone not from hurricane continent, these images are freaking scary. Like what do you mean the hurricanes are several times bigger than my entire country?
I’m just sitting here thinking holy hell I hope cyclones don’t come to my comfy corner of North-Eastern Europe
this can’t be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
This is like me comparing the joplin tornado to the el reno tornado.
(for those that don’t know the joplin tornado was an extremely erratic EF/F 5 tornado that was incredibly strong and just sort of showed up and then lingered over a particular area causing immense destruction, whereas el reno was a massive, very powerful tornado, that was collectively rated to be about an EF/F 3 i believe, although the core itself, and numerous shenanigans it pulled including sub vorticies or whatever the correct term is were much stronger, causing strong localized damage)
The different categories are the point. What they’re missing though is Helene was much closer to a category 5. It’s winds were 15 mph short of that category and the storm tail you can see in the above photo is characteristic of category 5 Hurricanes. That in and of itself isn’t a big deal. The big deal is that it’s the second storm at this strength this year. The first one stayed coastal where they’re used to all that rain.
What the picture is basically saying is Katrina was a warning shot. An actual Category 5 with winds well past 157 mph is going to hit the wrong spot and we’re all going to regret not taking climate change seriously.
going to
I don’t unpack my go bag anymore even though we only evacuate every sixth year or so. I’ve lived here 30 years and we’ve evacuated 4 times, will probably need to this year or next (fire season is almost over). Although, I’m calculating like it happens steadily, not taking into account the acceleration. 1996. 2007. 2017. 2020. uh, fuck. Now that I type that out, those last two are an awful “coincidence” and I need to go sit down.
Oof yeah. That wasn’t why we left the fire prone area we used to live in, but it sure didn’t hurt the decision to move.
The different categories are the point.
are they? storms are not like a magic black box that outputs a specific strength of storm, the point i’m making is that we should be comparing every storm we have since the beginning of recorded history and comparing them to what we’re seeing now, rather than taking one storm from like a decade ago, and comparing it to another now. This is a completely arbitrary description of climate change.
We’ve done that before. We’ve talked about how the heat has higher energy and water potential, we’ve talked about frequency of storms, of severe storms, of once rare phenomenon. This seems to grab people better.
and? It’s wrong. At least link to a source with relevant data or science on it. Shitposting and memes isn’t going to help.
Conservatives are literally pretending that biden isn’t giving places aid right now, after the hurricane, i don’t think this meme is going to stop that from happening lol.
It’s not wrong, the point just isn’t what you want it to be.
if the implied point of this post is to demonstrate that hurricanes have gotten worse over time due to climate change, yes this is objectively wrong, even if the underlying data is true.
Just because you have the correct solution, doesn’t mean you calculated it correctly.
To give an example here, let’s say i have a set of 99 numbers, 1-99 and lets say i add one more number, 100, but oops i accidentally add two more zeroes so now it’s actually 10,000
If i take an average of the extremes (not perfectly analogous here but i’m demonstrating a simple point) of 1, and 10,000 then the average is going to be 5,000 roughly. However most of those data points are going to live within 1-99 so this is an extremely incorrect “demonstration” of the effect here.
The primary problem here being that we don’t really know what the direct effects of climate change are going to be, just that we know what it will probably do, and if this is the first significant event of this category, we’re about to find out why fat fingering the 0 twice is going to be really unfortunate.
Now if the point is that “hurricane bigger than other hurricane lol” sure, but that’s a stupid point to make. Again my original example of joplin vs el reno tornados. It’s entirely arbitrary for no reason. It’d be like if i stopped you on the side of the road, picked up two rocks, and went “these sure are rocks aren’t they?”
this can’t be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
yeah but i don’t really see how that matters. Weather is extremely complicated, and unless hurricanes are a lot more consistent than i think they are, this is a lot like comparing two random tornados together, and then being surprised when one of them is a lot worse than the other.
If that’s what we’re doing we should compare the tri state tornado to any tornado in the last 10 years and suddenly tornados must be a lot less dangerous now than back when the tri state tornado hit.
It’s an entirely arbitrary mechanism of comparison. It’s just wrong.
Even if the point is trying to convey the difference between different storms, i can pick up two different rocks, they’re both different rocks. You can’t really glean something from 2 data points effectively.
