Seasonal Lag

The astronomical seasons are determined by the relationship of the sun to a planet (or moon). When a planet is tilted, as the Earth is, when days and nights are equal, you have an Equinox. Spring and Autumn equinoxes are March 21 and September 22. The longest day of the year north of the equator is June 22, and the shortest is December 21.

Those dates, in the Northern Hemisphere, are considered the start of our four seasons. April won't necessarily be warm, however. The trend in the Northern Hemisphere now is warming (cooling for my Australian and NZ fans!) but depending on your latitude, proximity to the ocean, and other local factors, it might not be very warm yet as spring technically arrives.

From Wikipedia, Season article

More goes into starting the warming of spring or the cooling of autumn than mere minutes of sunlight. Atmospheric realities delay heating and cooling, insulating the surface of the world, in effect. So, if the date in the Northern Hemisphere with the most sun is June 21, you might wonder why that isn't the hottest day of the year. It usually isn't. Hottest days are usually in July or August. In San Francisco, because of the influence of the ocean, the hottest day is usually around September 25, after astronomical autumn begins! (This results in an interesting non-atmospheric phenomenon where tourists arriving in June, expecting summer, freeze their bums off, and sweatshirt vendors on the street make a bundle of money selling clothes to them. :D ) In Southern Arizona, years when there's a good monsoon---a season of rain, with clouds coming in by noon most days--June actually is the hottest month, for the cloud cover makes July and August almost tolerable.

Again, the sunniest day of the year in the north is June 22. Interestingly, the closest the sun and earth draw to each other is in January, as the illustration above shows, so the summers in the Southern Hemisphere will be a little hotter, all other matters being equal.

The atmosphere takes time to warm, and the ocean takes longer. This is why San Francisco's seasonal lag is greater than inland lags, and it's why the peak Northern Atlantic hurricane months are September and October, when the ocean has finally warmed up to its summer temps.

Historically, some cultures have named six or eight seasons, not four. Other planets have longer or shorter seasonal lags. Mars's is almost zip! (It has very little atmosphere.) Uranus, on the other hand, has over a hundred years of season lag (data nmsu.edu):

					rad years
Venus					0.007
Earth					0.131
Mars					0.006
Jupiter					4.534
Saturn					20.794
Uranus					131.311
Neptune					121.008
Titan					0.053

Update on El Faro sinking

Because news has been so crazy this past year, stories like this tend to sink under the rough seas of the news cycle. But I posted about it when it happened, wondering why they'd kept steering into the hurricane, and here's the NTSB press release of six weeks ago on it, verbatim. RIP, crew

​WASHINGTON (Dec. 12, 2017) — The deadliest shipping disaster involving a U.S.-flagged vessel in more than 30 years was caused by a captain’s failure to avoid sailing into a hurricane despite numerous opportunities to route a course away from hazardous weather, the National Transportation Safety Board announced during a public meeting Tuesday.

The 790-foot, cargo vessel, S.S. El Faro, en route from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Juan, Puerto Rico, sank Oct. 1, 2015, in the Atlantic Ocean during Hurricane Joaquin, taking the lives of all 33 aboard.

“We may never understand why the captain failed to heed his crew’s concerns about sailing into the path of a hurricane, or why he refused to chart a safer course away from such dangerous weather,” said NTSB Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt.  “But we know all too well the devastating consequences of those decisions.”

NTSB investigators worked closely with the U.S. military and federal- and private-sector partners to locate the wreckage, photo- and video-document the ship and related debris field, and recover the El Faro’s voyage data recorder from more than 15,000 feet under the surface of the sea.

The ship departed Florida Sept. 29, 2015, and had a range of navigation options that would have allowed it to steer clear of the storm that later became a Category 4 hurricane.  The captain, consulting outdated weather forecasts and ignoring the suggestions of his bridge officers to take the ship farther south and away from the storm, ordered a course that intersected with the path of a hurricane that pounded the ship with 35-foot seas and 100 mph winds.

As the ship sailed into the outer bands of the storm, about five hours prior to the sinking, its speed decreased and it began to list to starboard due to severe wind and seas.  In the last few hours of the voyage, the crew struggled to deal with a cascading series of events, any one of which could have endangered the ship on its own.

Seawater entered the ship through cargo loading and other openings on a partially enclosed deck in the ship’s hull, pooled on the starboard side and poured through an open hatch into a cargo hold.  The hold began to fill with seawater, and automobiles in the hold broke free of lashings and likely ruptured a fire main pipe that could have allowed thousands of gallons of seawater per minute into the ship – faster than could be removed by bilge pumps.

About 90 minutes before the sinking the listing ship lost its propulsion and was unable to maneuver, leaving it at the mercy of the sea.  Although the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship when the sinking was imminent, the crew’s chances of survival were significantly reduced because El Faro was equipped with life rafts and open uncovered lifeboats, which met requirements but were ineffective in hurricane conditions.

The NTSB also said that the poor oversight and inadequate safety management system of the ship’s operator, TOTE, contributed to the sinking.

“Although El Faro and its crew should never have found themselves in such treacherous weather, that ship was not destined to sink,” said Sumwalt.  “If the crew had more information about the status of the hatches, how to best manage the flooding situation, and the ship’s vulnerabilities when in a sustained list, the accident might have been prevented.”

As a result of the 26-month long investigation, the NTSB made 29 recommendations to the U.S. Coast Guard, two to the Federal Communications Commission, one to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, nine to the International Association of Classification Societies, one to the American Bureau of Shipping, one to Furuno Electric Company and 10 to TOTE Services.

The complete accident report will be available in several weeks.  The executive summary, including the findings, probable cause and safety recommendations is available at https://go.usa.gov/xnRAn.

Additional information related to this investigation, including news releases, photographs, videos, and a link to the accident docket containing more than 30,000 pages of factual material, is available on the El Faro accident investigation page at http://go.usa.gov/xnRTW

The Chronic Disaster: Poverty

…chronic conditions as well as acute events can induce trauma, and this, too, belongs in our calculations. A chronic disaster is one that gathers force slowly and insidiously, creeping around one’s defenses rather than smashing through them. People are unable to mobilize their normal defenses against the threat, sometimes because they have elected consciously or unconsciously to ignore it, sometimes because they have been misinformed about it, and sometimes because they cannot do anything to avoid it in any case. -- Kai Ericson

I’ve been following disaster scholar Scott Knowles for a while now on Twitter, and he uses the term “slow disaster” to talk about poverty, and it was his posts that made me want to write this article. We need to look, he and others say, more at economically disadvantaged people and how disasters affect them more—harder and for longer—than they do more advantaged people.

One of Haiti's tent cities, still plentiful 8 years after the big quake

We’ve seen this in the US this past hurricane season at the macro level. Texas and Florida got a lot of attention and relief, while Puerto Rico, poorer to begin with, received less. As I write this, it’s over a hundred days after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and half the people do not yet have electricity. Imagine that happening in Florida and the outcry there’d be.

This becomes a problem for several reasons

Poor people live in substandard housing, which is more vulnerable in an earthquake, tornado, or hurricane. Poor people are more likely to build in flood plains unprotected by good levees.
Poor people have less of a voice in governments. Poor people seldom run for local office (often an unpaid job at the beginning level) and never develop a political career that goes farther. Even at a local level, they might be on the zoning board, but several of my relatives were on zoning boards, and I promise you, that’s a time suck. Who can afford that kind of public service but people who are already financially comfortable—whether because of retirement or a high income or a wealthy spouse. And so poor people and their concerns—their safety, their education, their needs, and their very lives—are not a part of the public discourse about safety or defense against disaster.

Poor people have fewer resources when the disaster hits. I think this whenever television talks to a homeowner who has behind him, the day after a storm surge, six guys working on tearing out his drywall. “The wife has the Sharpeis and is at a hotel,” he says, nonchalantly. I promise you, there are poor people living ten miles from him who couldn’t think of staying in a hotel, have to do the work themselves, and have to live in damp, moldy, dangerous homes while they struggle along. If they are renting, good luck getting a landlord to come right out and fix a bad situation. (something I was recently reminded of when renting for the first time in years, when the landlord refused to repair a series of problems, from bats to crickets to lead-laced water to a broken toilet. As I’m not poor, I just said “(Forget) you!” and moved, but were I truly poor, that might not be an option.)

Recovery takes longer for poor people. Few can afford renter’s insurance. Some lose their jobs because a car is destroyed and they can’t afford another to get to work. One big natural disaster hit on a poor family can mean no more chances to leave poverty, a life lived out suffering from the downstream effects, which can snowball and carry into the next generation. Nor might they have health insurance, and probably not mental health coverage, so any trauma they experienced goes untreated. Families can deteriorate in such a situation, and that leads to—yes, you guessed it—worsening poverty.

TV crews tend not to go into poor areas to interview disaster survivors. They aren’t as pretty to film, the producers and directors assume no one wants to see squalor, and perhaps the poor aren’t as articulate. So we tend to forget about those truly in need, the working poor, the homeless, and the dispossessed.

For more on the topic, you can read articles at
http://www.preventionweb.net/risk/poverty-inequality

How natural are disasters?

Natural disasters often aren’t “natural” at all.

When a volcano erupts, when a big earthquake happens, when that earthquake causes a tsunami, a “natural disaster” has a natural cause, to be sure. (Usually. Fracking for natural gas now causes a lot of earthquakes in Oklahoma and Montana, but so far these are far too small to kill anyone.)

But in the cases of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and electrical outages, often the “disaster” part is about not what nature has done, but about what we have done. It is a natural event made disastrous by human choices.

This is even true to an extent about earthquakes. Even a 9.0 earthquake would have a hard time killing people if we all lived in yurts or tipis. A few living such a life would die from rock falls, and on the coast many thousand might die from a tsunami were conditions right, but most people these days die in earthquakes from stuff—man-made stuff—falling on their heads. Roofs, facades, windows, paintings, lumber, facing stones, pediments, and bridges all come tumbling down when the earth shakes. In your own house, a heavy glass-fronted painting hanging on the wall could be the end of you in a quake.

If a hurricane hits an uninhabited island, there is no disaster. That’s just Mother Nature doing what she’s done for millions of years. Palm trees evolved to make it through hurricanes. And while hurricanes are certainly a force of nature, if we made better building decisions, wrote stricter zoning codes, and made evacuations mandatory on the mainland and built tough concrete shelters on islands, almost no one would die.

As the earth warms, as oceans warm, and as storms become bigger, incidents of extreme weather and wildfire grow bigger and more dangerous. This too was our choice—is our choice every time we drive a car or turn the air conditioning down or the heat up, with each child we have who goes on to have more children, all of them living the standard suburban life with its profligate energy use. This is our choice, not Mother Nature’s to drive worse weather disasters.

We make choices that can make weather and tectonic events worse...or better. All of those natural events are, whether we think of it often or not, necessary to life on Earth as we know it.

By law, in Miami, for instance, you must build better now to survive hurricanes. (But what do poor people living in sub-standard housing do? What do the poor of Puerto Rico do? Or the poor living in the flood plains of the world’s big rivers? I'll address this in more detail next week.)

Zoning regulations are also stricter in LA and San Francisco, which have some of the most stringent building codes in the US. (Japan’s are far better still--and there’s hardly a type of severe disaster Japan isn’t prone to.) Most of the buildings that lasted through the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake will last again through a similar-strength quake. And if buildings suffered cracks or survivable damage, the owners, if they were smart, did some retrofitting. I worked in an historical brick building in San Francisco, and the owners spent tens of thousands of dollars in the retrofit in the early 80’s, and the building came through the 1989 quake perfectly intact, though most brick buildings will crumble into a pile of bricks and mortar that has returned to sand in a big quake.

At a personal level, people can also get smarter. Once I experienced the quake, every house I lived in thereafter I did certain things to. I strapped the hot water heater to a support beam. I drove screws through the back of bookcases and knick-knack shelving and into studs in the wall. You pick up one disaster of a house in a quake, and you don’t do it again. You pay for a seismic inspection and do whatever the inspector tells you to do.

I know I'm being terribly judgmental here, but I do not understand when I see videos of Oklahoma post-tornado, and we’re looking at nice ranch homes, and the reporter says only one in 100 people have a basement or tornado shelter. People, you live in Oklahoma! Don’t you love your children? Apparently not, for there aren’t even laws about elementary schools in Oklahoma having tornado shelters or safe rooms. People standing in front of leveled homes will talk on TV about how they lost their new flatscreen TV and boat, which they apparently had the money to buy instead of a tornado shelter. That surely fits the definition of insanity. The absence of a legal requirement for schools to have shelters seems to me criminally irresponsible of zoning commissions and Oklahoma's state legislature, and I don't know about you, but I hate thinking of those children dying who do not have to. People, it’s only money. So, a better legislature passes a law mandating school shelters, and everyone in the district pays an extra $25 on their annual property tax bill for five years to build the school a shelter. Surely a human life, the life of an 8-year-old, even if you never meet that child, is worth that tiny amount to you. Isn't it? Apparently not, for it's still not happening there.

So before we blame Mother Nature for disasters, we should look in the mirror. Are you contributing to climate change more than an average person on the planet? Is your house in a risky area and you haven’t bothered to do everything you can afford to minimize your risks? Are you one of those fools who owns a working car but does not obey a mandatory evacuation order? (Do such people simply not understand the word “mandatory?”) And please tell me you’re not one of those fools who runs out to the dock to take a video of the storm surge coming in and the 12 foot waves breaking! If you want to live in wildfire area, you think hard before buying a place right up against the woods or dry grasses, asking yourself if the pretty view is worth the risk, and you consider concrete and tile construction before you fall in love with the beautiful hardwood and cedar shake ranch home. You keep the yard picked up and trees far away from the house, just as the fire marshal recommends. And if you're a developer, you do not fight sane zoning laws that keep safe distances between subdivisions that help prevent a wildfire jumping quickly from one neighborhood to the next.

Even if we do everything we can, some people will still die in natural disasters. A hurricane’s storm surge can be quick and powerful. A traffic jam in a n evacuation zone can be so terrible that people end up exposed to the disaster and die. You might already be disabled, and it’s impossible for you to get out in time. You might be poor and not be able to evacuate. Your state may have planned badly for evacuations and there's not enough gasoline for sale to get everyone out of the area. Bad luck happens.

But please, don’t make a natural event into a disaster it didn’t have to be. Live in as safe a place you can afford, and be as prepared as you can. (more information at https://www.ready.gov/make-a-plan)

I know I'll never convince TV to write copy about Mother Nature's "wrath" during disasters. She is not actually wrathful. She's doing what she is meant to do, what she did before people came along, and what she'll do after people are gone. The dramatic events like hurricanes and earthquakes are only disastrous to us when we've made choices that don't take their inevitability into account.

Habits that help you prepare for a disaster

Disasters might give you warning, as with hurricanes, but usually they do not. You're sitting there reading a book, and the power goes out. Or the earth starts to shake and your glass figurines fall off the shelf. Or the tornado siren comes. Or your phone buzzes, and it's your local emergency management office telling you there has been a train wreck and toxic chemicals are spilling into your neighborhood. Or you look up from pulling weeds in the vegetable garden, and the sky has gone dark and the sun is turning pink, and the hair on the back of your neck lets you know it's a wildfire blowing your way.

Of course you have your emergency supplies ready for "sheltering in place," don't you? And an emergency contact plan with your family, including someone out of town who will coordinate your locations and safety check-ins? You know that when cell towers get overloaded, texts will get through when calls won't, right?

You already own a generator if you're in a cold climate, or hurricane country, or dependent upon an electric breathing device to stay alive, and you won't be one of those people running out to buy one 10 minutes before a hurricane hits, will you? And you have your car filled up to at least half, because letting it go below half a tank is a bad thing. If you have a hybrid or electric, you top it up every night, right?

Your shelves have plenty of canned food, including soups, and you have bags of rice and beans and canned tomatoes to flavor them.  And you have a camp stove or gas stove or propane grill outside so you can cook them, right?

You're not short on kitty litter or pet food, I hope!

You know your neighbors, and who among them is elderly or disabled and might need your help, don't you? The single parents that might be away when the disaster strikes, leaving frightened children alone?

No? Then don't wait until it's too late. Make sure all that is in place by the end of next weekend. Get into good habits, and then you won't be caught off-guard when a disaster does happen.

Puerto Rico in Crisis

3 Days after Maria passed

A humanitarian crisis is ongoing in Puerto Rico, and its national government has been far too slow to respond. Some highlights, as I write this:

• Power is out throughout the island
• Safe water is a problem
• The death toll is not yet known
• It took five days for the territory’s governor to get in touch with the mayors of all towns large enough to have them
• Children’s hospital has been out of fuel for their generators for days
• Lines for limited gas create panic
• Agriculture is decimated for the year--no new crops of any kind for many months
• The infrastructure is damaged--power lines, water lines, roads, and more
• People desperate for food and medicine have looted closed drugs stores
• Opportunistic looters are making the streets unsafe
• Dangerous prisoners have escaped a storm-damaged prison
• People rushing home to loved ones are being price gouged by airlines
• For nearly a week hospitals did not have running water

And I hate to be a doomsayer on this, but I know there could be more to come. For instance, what if one dead body in a stream was a person with a communicable disease? An epidemic disease is possible. I'm not wishing for it. I'm dreading it.

Because of a lack of leadership from the White House, people finally went around that roadblock to help. The Mayor of New York organized shipments of supplies. Individuals begged FEMA and Health Corps workers to act anyway, even without orders from the top. And many did.

Most of my readers live in a safe place, a place where they can rely on police or fire coming to help. Certainly if there were a disaster, they’d see evidence of rescue workers right away. Puerto Rico residents waited five days before much happened at all. Five days without stores open. Five days without hot food. Five days without communication, not knowing if the water coming from the tap was safe to bathe in or not. It’s hot and muggy there as well, which must make everything seem so much worse.

I write disaster novels as entertainment, but I never want to see a disaster happen. And my heart goes out to my fellow Americans. I’ve donated money--including money to the American Library Association, to help rebuild and restock libraries there and in the USVI, when the immediate crisis is over. Donate to safe, known places: UNICEF, Save the Children, The Red Cross all have funds for Maria.

I’m ashamed of how late my federal government acted to save its own citizens. And poor towns in Texas still have terrible problems and dangerous pollution from Harvey. I guess this is the future we have to look forward to unless we are filthy rich. Very sad indeed.

It also serves as a warning to us all. We cannot necessarily rely on our governments, which may be in a crisis of whatever nature themselves. We have to take care of ourselves.

So I’m thinking “three days of food and water” may no longer be enough to keep on hand. Have a five-day supply on hand at all times for those disasters we can’t anticipate, like tornadoes, earthquakes, and power outages. If you are in the way of a hurricane, if one seems remotely likely to hit you in ten days, start buying extra supplies for ten or fourteen days that far in advance. If you can afford a hybrid car, that would help evacuate you when gasoline runs out. (You can still get 100 miles away from a dangerous coastal area on your electric charge, and as all-electric cars continue to improve, one day, they’ll take you over 500 miles on one charge). And a spare, portable solar panel and battery pack might see you through many days of power outages--not to live a comfy suburban life with TV and cold drinks, but to have the necessities and communication capability you’ll so desperately want.

lines for gas were 4-5 miles long

My heart goes out to the people of Puerto Rico. I wish I could do more to help them.

Hurricane Harvey

I blog often about hurricanes during the season, and you can click on the word "hurricanes" at the tail end of the post to see more, but I wanted to talk about Harvey a bit.

defense.gov image

First of all, I am not without sympathy for the people who lost everything during the storm. Many of them were poor to begin with, and now they have nothing, and nothing to rebuild with. It's tragic.

However...there are a couple of howevers in all this.

1) The City of Houston has been making stupid zoning decisions for a long, long time. I've seen interviews with their own emergency managers on The Weather Channel dating back years, angry and desperate at this. They all KNEW this was coming. But instead of managing development, or requiring developers to deal with storm drainage, they let people build willy-nilly with no regard for the nature of their city, the problems they already have, or the fact that hurricanes hit that area of Texas every 10-20 years. They knew this was coming and apparently did not give a damn. And someone was lining their pockets. Developers, definitely. Elected city officials? Well, there are kickbacks that are traceable and those that are not, the "we golf at the same place and give each other's kids jobs" sort of glad-handing ways of politics everywhere.

So before you commit too much money to relief efforts, and before you cheerfully watch a billion dollars of federal tax money go to relief and think that's 100% okay, understand: they knew it was going to happen and they let it. They could have prevented a lot of the damage. If I ran the world (and I'd be a nasty fascist dictator, I suspect, so good thing I don't), I'd strip the wealth of every Houston developer and every Houston city council member. I'd leave them in nothing but their underwear, huddled on the sidewalk, all their accounts frozen, and see how they like it. And that money would go to poor people the city did not care about. Unfortunately, I don't rule the world. Rich people rule it, and you can be sure they have each other's backs on this. There won't even be a condition to the bail-out money that they change their zoning. There will be no justice, and the next hurricane will be as horrible for them and require another billion to bail them out again. I thought it was important you knew about this.

2) Be careful where you send your donations. The Red Cross, though administration-heavy, does get money and services to victims. Catholic Charities is another vetted organization. There is a Houston Food Bank, and there is a Houston Humane Society. Don't send money through GoFundMe or the like. There are as many scam artists as true victims there. I know it's appealing to think that if you avoid big agencies that no money will go to pay staff or for rent or so on, but better 70% of your money get to the victims than 100% go to a scammer.

3) Instead of only wringing your hands at the horrors you've seen on TV, think about your own locale, its natural disasters or the nearby chemical plants or nuke plants and rails on which dangerous chemicals are shipped, or a week-long power outage during extreme weather, and imagine the worst possible scenarios for you and your loved ones, turn off the TV, and make a plan:

A) In the first case, you have to grab and go. You have 10 minutes to do it. Most of us would spend that 10 minutes grabbing a child's favorite toy, the pets, the cell phone, and our old photo albums. Have a go-bag ready for every family member so you don't have to stop and pack clothes and shoes as well. Put a couple of pop-top cans of food or MREs in each bag and a few bottles of water. Help your kids pack their own bags. That will get you through a day where you're fleeing. And don't ever let your gas tank go under 1/2 a tank, because you really never know

B) In the second case, you are going to shelter in place and ride out a hurricane or ice storm or earthquake aftermath--either because you choose to or you haven't any choice. Don't wait until the last minute to gear up for this. Always have a five-day supply of emergency lighting, bottled water, canned food, some emergency cash, and other supplies you'll need. Go check out ready.gov for more specifics. You only need do this once, leave the food most accessible, and switch it out once a year. (I'm a big fan of wheeled trash cans for this purpose--then if you need to walk a mile to a shelter or friend's house, you can push the thing along.) If you keep this up, you won't have to fight crowds or arm-wrestle over the last AA batteries on the shelf.

fill me with emergency supplies

Again, I'm sorry for the people who were hurt by the hurricane, those who are homeless, those who lost everything or, worst of all, a loved one. I'm not callous. But I am a realist, and I don't want your tender emotions to lead you to bad decisions.

Hurricane Matthew

If you live on the east coast of the US or the Bahamas, do not take your eyes off this! 

I've been following this hurricane closely and studying the maps at sites I referred you to in Advanced Hurricane Links last month. (In fact, I've let my fascination with it cut into my writing time, which must stop!)

Friday morning I saw it had intensified overnight and was not going to stop. I tweeted that it was scary and predicted to a friend IRL it'd be Cat 5 before bedtime. It was. I began worrying about my Florida fans and all the Floridians I didn't know, and everyone in Kingston Jamaica, who looked like they were in for terrible times.

I admit I was befuddled about the models, which had it turning north, and I continued to be befuddled Saturday morning, when I pulled this 700hPa wind map off earth.nullschool.net.

I could see the cyclonic and anticyclonic areas over the Ohio Valley and Atlantic, respectively, and the likely path north between them is obvious, a channel right up the coast as of that moment.  But my question--and I couldn't find an answer for it anywhere--was what made forecasters think the storm was going to turn north within minutes of when I took this screen cap? I couldn't see any path north for it to get to the northward channel. It was obviously being steered west.

Leaving the mystery alone, I forced myself away from researching the question to write, did my daily words, and by nightfall my time on Saturday, it was moving NW. One strange thing about this storm (and it's a weird one!) is that on satellite, you can see a big area of convection, bigger than the core of the hurricane, to its east. This happened because that side of the storm was, for a long time, over high mountains in South America, which changed the storm's dynamics. When it moves entirely away from SA, that huge batch of thunderstorms may be wrapped into the main circulation, or it might stay just like that (looks like eyes, doesn't it?)...until it hits Haiti.

Infrared view of Matthew 1140 UT, 2 October

Deforested, poor, and still not recovered from the big earthquake, Haiti will not fare well under that powerful bunch of storms. Mudslides and flooding will kill, and if the death toll is in the hundreds, I won't be surprised.

As to where it's going after it's done with Haiti and Cuba? Too much about the future is uncertain. How far north will a low pressure system now in Ohio move? How strong will the high ridge now building in the Atlantic become? My feeling all day yesterday was that the official track was a little too far east, that Florida and the Carolinas are still in danger. One model (and a good model, not one of the weird ones that is never right) has a major hurricane slamming into Maine in a week! So everyone on the East Coast of the continental US needs to watch this thing.

And remember, if you see a forecast for four days down the road and it isn't aimed at you, that's no guarantee you are safe. On average, that far in advance, they're wrong by 200 miles, which the NHC itself mentions in some of its updates. Weather is complicated, which makes long-range forecasting difficult. Get your supplies today, just in case. If the hurricane curves out to sea, you can be thankful, and the supplies will serve you well for the next storm, power outage, or earthquake, too.

ETA, Tuesday 3 Oct. I answered my own questions about the steering.

1) The turn north did not happen for 30 hours beyond when I looked at steering maps. By then, it made sense to me from looking at the maps. So some forecasts promised the turn too quickly.
2) I've read--but haven't thoroughly investigated--that which steering level to look at depends on the storm itself, barometric pressure, cloud heights, etc. I'll have to dig into that one and see....
3) The blog moderator at WU pointed out that all Northern Hemisphere storms want to "visit the North Pole." I thought about it for five seconds and realized why. I did a thought experiment of the sort that we did physically in junior high physics, imagining a drop of colored fluid on a spinning top, just "north" of the top's equator, and I could see it. This is, of course, another part of the Coriolis effect. If nothing else is steering a hurricane--or if all the forces that are trying to do so balance out, it'll move north. If it's caught in trade winds (as from Africa to the Caribbean), those will steer it. If there are high or low pressure areas, those can steer it. Otherwise, it does indeed want to "visit the North Pole."

..and the models and forecast tracks are inching west today, so that part of my guess did come true. If you're in Florida or the Carolinas, it's time to do early prep: take in the lawn furniture, clean out the freezer, put a bunch of bottles of water in there to freeze solid by Wednesday and keep it colder longer, fill up the spare gas cans on your way to/from work tomorrow, buy or charge batteries. As the forecasts narrow it down, you may need to do more. If they tell  you to evacuate, please, evacuate.

Advanced Hurricane Links

earth.nullschool.net via Mr. Masters

After this post, I promised to give you more links on hurricanes. Here they are!

One important factor in if a tropical wave will develop into a storm with a closed circulation--and possibly into a dangerous hurricane--is the wind sheer. Here's one map with sheer. Sheer can tear apart a hurricane.

I originally found these U/WI maps through this site, which explains in brief many of the maps you can link in the above UWisc site. The first time I looked at many of them, I thought “what am I looking at?” But the more you look, and the more you go back to explanations, the clearer the maps appear. Those of you who might watch The Weather Channel but have not dug deeply into how hurricanes form will have heard many of these terms: sheer, vorticity, convergence, and divergence. So here is that information which those forecasters look at before summarizing it for the broadcast audience. 

A great map to look at when you want to become a thoughtful amateur forecaster is this one, the depth of the 26C ocean layer. The redder, the deeper. This matters because hurricanes derive energy from hot ocean water, and because as they strengthen, they churn up deeper layers of ocean. If those deeper layers are cold, hurricanes can "turn themselves off" by doing this churning. But if the heat goes deep, they can churn and churn and still get fed. Katrina is a textbook example of one that had a deep 26C isotherm to feed from.

NOAA 22 August 2016

Large-scale weather patterns help determine where hurricanes are likely to develop in any given month. Dr. Masters at Weather Underground revisits the basics of the CCKW (convectively coupled Kelvin wave), MJO (Madden-Julian oscillation), and La Nina/El Nino,  from time to time. Here is a link to his recent post on these. I was particularly happy to see this one because I’d been watching the TIW -- that wavy cold temperature thing off South America in the top image of this post--developing and getting colder, and I had no idea what it was called. I was fairly certain “wavy cold temperature thing” was not the term the pros would use. I’m relieved that now I know: Tropical Instability Wave.

Let's return to the super-cool site earth.nullschool.net. I'm linking you here directly to the No. Atlantic. Watch the winds blow for a moment. (Soothing, isn't it?...except maybe for Floridians.) Now hit "I" on your keyboard. And keep hitting it. What this will do is take you upward through the layers of air, all the way up to the stratosphere. The redder the lines, the faster the wind is blowing.

You’ll notice that if you hunt down more and more links that explain these images and why they're important, you’ll start seeing calculus equations...and I admit, that’s where I stop my researches. If it takes calc to unpeel the next layer of understanding, I’ve learned enough for fiction-writing purposes. This ends up being a good thing, for if I didn’t have some sort of trigger to stop me, I’d do nothing but research and write no novels!

A friend wrote me an email this morning and said, "What, are you psychic? How did you know to post these hurricane links when you did?" No, I'm not psychic! If you watch African weather and do it from year to year, you learn to see them coming a long way off. To someone living in 1888 on the Gulf Coast, your or my ability to forecast hurricanes would seem like magic, wouldn't it?

And yes, there will be a hurricane novel one day to take its place beside my tornado, earthquake, and volcano novels, Storm, Quake, and Erupt. I have many ideas, and a person can only write a handful of books every year.

Hurricane links

As the North Atlantic hurricane season is starting in earnest, I wanted to mention some of my favorite links that I, an amateur weather nerd, follow enthusiastically when a tropical depression has become a hurricane, particularly one that will hit land. Most of these will work for anywhere in the world, so you don’t have to be a North American to find your local storm information.

Image, NOAA/Wikimedia commons

NOAA National Hurricane Center advisories. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ The top NHC meteorologists break it down for you every three hours during an active storm.

Maps. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.php Click through the various loops: Dvorak, satellite, funktop, and others, and you’ll learn a lot simply by comparing the images. (Read up a little, and you’ll learn more) Some show cloud height in different colors and some show wind speeds in different colors, some show water vapor. Interesting stuff.

Earthnull.net.  https://earth.nullschool.net/ Surface winds, and a beautiful presentation. Being the nerd I am, I can spend an hour spinning the globe, magnifying, moving back out, figuring out what’s happening and how it all connects, watching the dance of the winds on this tiny planet we call home. Isn’t the internet cool?!?

capture 15:12UT, 13 August 2016, Pacific Ocean

Weather Underground’s hurricane update, https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/ , often updated 2-3 times a day when the winds are blowing. Dr. Masters and the other scientists are great (link to that blog on right side of page), and the comments on the blog run from the head-scratchingly silly to the brilliant amateur with good insights and of course with plenty of needless internet bickering.

When a hurricane develops, for video storm coverage, nothing is better for me the writer, wanting to know what it feels like on the ground to normal people, than finding a local news station that streams and is covering it full-time. I can’t give you specific links, for my crystal ball is at the shop and I can’t tell you where the next hurricane landfall will be in North America. Name a big city in the area of likely impact, google that and “live streaming television” and you should find something.

Also, there are often webcams on beaches, on boardwalks, and at resort hotels aimed out to sea. Whereas live TV coverage streamed from Mexico is nearly impossible to find, webcams are common enough at resort towns, so even Mexican landfalls can often be watched. Switching between cameras at various locations can give you that feel of being there, watching the thing come at you. Often, the weather knocks out the feed when winds are over 80 mph, but until then, it’s fascinating to check in on the images from time to time. Again, googling should find some for you. Sometimes, a city’s chamber of commerce or tourism site has links to several.

You may ask me, “Lou, so after your morning hours of writing or revising or proofreading are over, how many hours can you spend moving from one of these sites to the next when a full-scale hurricane (or something akin, like Sandy) is moving in?” And the answer to that is, 12 hours, easily.

All together now. “Weather nerd!”

Stay tuned for part two, some more advanced links.