A sultry day was in the offing near Purnell OK, the seat of McCurtain County in the state’s southeast quadrant, just a dozen miles northwest from the triple point where Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma meet. One hundred forty miles northeast, the National Weather Service Doppler radar station KSRX at Ft. Smith Arkansas, was monitoring a cold front approaching from the west, driven by a mass of cool dry air sweeping down from the northern plains. Typical for the late spring in the American prairie, this eastbound mass was colliding with a warm, wet air mass streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, now roiling under a cool dry tongue at 700 mb. Buoyant but trapped under heavier cool air, supercells were forming in the humid 850 mb surface layer twenty miles west of Purnell.
Category Archives: Hurricanes and Tornadoes
Global Warming, New York, The Jersey Shore, and Canada
Image 1: People enjoying the beach in Montreal, Canada, courtesy Jazz Hostels
While climate change and global warming will mean longer and hotter summers and shorter and warmer winters farther north in the northern hemisphere than previously, and even though we make like longer hotter summers and shorter, warmer winters …
Warmer and shorter winters mean thinner ice on frozen lakes – and people crashing through the thin ice and drowning in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Alaska, and Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia.
Longer hotter summers also mean warmer oceans and an atmosphere that can hold more heat.
Power, Infrastructure, Hurricanes, and Emergencies
Hurricane Sandy, the 1,000 mile diameter storm brought rain, wind, water and power failures to 10.4 million from North Carolina up to Maine, and west to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan in the USA and another 145,000 people in Canada, over 1.5 million people. As NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, here, “We have old infrastructure and new weather patterns… climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable.”
We need to build infrastructure that is more resistant to extreme storms, and resilient in the face of these kinds of storms.
Hurricane Sandy, the Frankenstorm
- Hurricane Sandy is 900 miles wide – bigger than Irene.
- It will interact with a cold front coming from Canada that will form a Nor’ Easter.
- It will also interact with the Jet Stream, that will pull it northward, then refocus it back south-westerly arc toward New York City, Long Island, and New Jersey.
- The full moon – which triggers higher tides – will trigger a storm surge.
Man made factors that will exacerbate the storm’s damage:
- Atmospheric CO2 and water vapor – the concentration of carbon dioxide and water vapor is higher today due to burning fossil fuels. This means the atmosphere can hold more heat, and is holding more water, the oceans are warmer; thus storms will be bigger and more severe.
- Coastal development – sand dunes gone from Long Island make us more vulnerable to storm surges and flooding
- Crumbling infrastructure gives us a diminished ability to weather the storm.
- Lack of emergency preparedness gives us a diminished ability to weather the storm.
- Satellites, in need of repair, give us a diminished ability to monitor the storm.
- Nuclear Power plants in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will need to be monitored. Some will be shut down, as they were last year during Hurricane Irene, leading to power outages. See “Nuclear Power, Natural Disasters, and Security.”This gives us diminished ability to weather the storm, and forces us to deploy resources to safeguard infrastructure.
In August of 2011 the Millstone 2 & 3 plants in Connecticut and the Brunswick 1 & 2 plants in North Carolina were operated at reduced capacity during and after Hurricane Irene, while the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey, and the North Anna 1 & 2 plants in Virginia, were offline. The North Anna plants were shut down before the hurricane due to the earthquake. I expect Hurricane Sandy will effect most of those plants, and also the Calvert Creek plant in Maryland, Hope Creek, and Salem in Jersey, Indian Point in New York, and Vermont Yankee, in Vermont.
Solar power, wind, and wave power won’t work during a hurricane, but don’t need emergency crew on hand to make sure cooling systems are operational. And geothermal will function.
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As an analyst with Popular Logistics, I am available for research and analysis on a per project or a per diem basis. I can be reached at ‘L Furman 97” @ G Mail . com and US 732 . 580 . 0024.
Tweet “Irene is especially worrisome … because of its uncommonly massive size. According to Ron Steve, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Wilmington Office, Irene covers an area of approximately 170,000 square miles, or about the size of California or Iraq.” Star News Online.
The storm had a 400 miles north to south and covered 170,000 square miles – about the size of California.