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| Just part of the Tampa Bay area. You can see how vulnerable the heavily populated area would be to a storm surge from a hurricane like Irma. |
The big storm is still playing around with Florida, keeping everyone wondering which part of the state it's going to nail hardest.
It really hadn't started its northward turn yet, and was moving along the northern Cuban coast.
This interaction with land has kinda, sorta weakened Irma ever so slightly, but as I said yesterday, don't focus on the word "weaken." It still is and will be a horrible, horrible hurricane.
It's a huge storm in area, so a wide area is going to get tropical force and hurricane force winds.
The current thinking now is it will turn north in time to make landfall near Key West, Florida, which is just terrible, given how low and exposed the keys are.
Sustained winds could still be 140 or 150 mph or so once Irma reaches the Keys, depending upon how much Cuba's land interfered with Irma's circulation, and how much it can restrengthen over water.
Re-strengthening is forecast once Irma leaves Cuba.
I don't think I've ever seen as dire a warning from a National Weather Service office as I did last night when the NWS meteorologists in Key West, Florida said this: "This is as real as it gets. Nowhere in the Florida Keys will be safe."
Adds Ed Rappaport, acting director of the National Hurricane Center: "It's not clear that it's a survivable situation for anybody that is still there in the Keys."
I really, really hope everybody left.
It now looks like Irma will move north along the western Florida coast, not eastern as was projected a few days ago. Irma is a huge sized hurricane, so that's kind of cold comfort for eastern Florida. Though it might not be quite as bad in places like Miami and Fort Lauderdale as first feared, it's going to be very dangerous there, with storm surges and hurricane strength winds.
TAMPA BAY WORRIES
The cities that are now in real trouble are Naples, Tampa and St. Petersburg.
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| Destruction from Irma in the Caribbean islands. |
The Tampa Bay region has always been regarded as particularly vulnerable to strong hurricanes. Thousands upon thousands of people have built homes on spits of land that are barely above sea level.
Barely five weeks ago, the New Orleans Times Picayune had a big article about how the Tampa Bay area is likely the most vulnerable city in America to a catastrophic hurricane. This is the same publication that predicted catastrophe for New Orleans months before Katrina.
Here's just one scary paragraph from the Times Picayune article, one that leaves everyone in a cold sweat now that Irma looms:
"By a stroke of gambler's luck, Tampa Bay hasn't suffered a direct hit from a hurricane as powerful as a category 3 or higher in nearly a century. Tampa has doubled down on a bet that another won't strike anytime soon, investing billions of dollars n high-rise condominiums along the waterfront and shipping port upgrades and expanding a hospital on an island in the middle of the bay to make it one of the largest in the state."
Oh, and by the way, natural processes and sea level rises due to global warming have made water during normal times closer to all these buildings. The Tampa Bay area experiences some flooding in even small storms.
How about this from the Times Picayune: "Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn's warning was even starker. Standing outside City Hall last year, he described what would happen if a hurricane as small as a category 3 with 110 to 130 mph winds hit downtown:
'Where you're standing now would be 15 feet under water.'"
A guess we can still hope for Tampa's gambler's luck and Irma will somehow go west or east of Tampa, or weakens more than expected, but at best, this will still be an enormous deadly mess.
At the moment, the Irma forecast for the Tampa Bay area is winds of 90 to 110 mph with gusts to 135 mph, with a three to five foot storm surge. Much of the property around Tampa Bay is at elevations of five feet or less.
IRMA'S RECORDS
The records Irma has set are pretty amazing.
The Washington Post, in a terrific explanation of Irma's strength and staying power, says Irma "lucked out" in a variety of ways.
The hurricane threaded the needle between land masses. Landfalls almost always weaken hurricanes terribly quickly, unless they pass over such tiny islands as Barbuda and St. Martin, as Irma did.
Wind shear, which is strong or shifting winds in the upper atmosphere, tend to quash hurricanes. Wind shear over the Atlantic has been particularly weak this year, so hurricanes in the Atlantic during 2017 have a better chance of getting really, really strong.
That's a big reason why Hurricanes Harvey and now Jose are so strong, joining the intensity of Irma.
Steering currents are important as to where hurricanes go. The Bermuda High, the area of high pressure in the Atlantic that always asserts itself in the summer, has been stronger and further west than usual. That helps hurricanes maintain a generally westward motion to the south of the Bermuda High.
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| Another view of Irma's destruction |
Had the Bermuda high been weaker, it would have been easier for storms like Harvey and Irma to recurve northward into the middle part of the North Atlantic, where they would have died harmless deaths.
(Even so, hurricanes this year can still curve north. After trashing islands previously wrecked by Irma, Hurricane Jose will likely turn north well before reaching North America, so it's no real threat to the United States.)
Finally, Atlantic Ocean waters in most areas are warmer than normal. And yes, this has to do with climate change. As climate change progresses, we won't necessarily have to contend with more hurricanes than we do now, but chances are whatever hurricanes form have a higher potential of becoming wicked strong.
The Atlantic Ocean has always produced incredibly formidable hurricanes, but usually, the western Pacific creates the kings of all tropical systems. (They're called typhoons over there; typhoons and hurricanes are exactly the same thing.)
Not this year.
The Washington Post says this about Irma:
"When the storm maintained wind speeds of at least 180 mph for 37 hours, it set a record for most intense storm for such a long duration - anywhere on Earth.
Super Typgoon Haiyan (Yolanda) - which devastated the Philippines and killed more than 6,000 people in 2013, was the previous record holder at 24 hours"
That the Atlantic Ocean should produce a hurricane as strong as Irma isn't a slam dunk proof of global warming. Still, it should concern us all that a lot of tropical systems - hurricanes and typhoons and whatnot - have been setting records for intensity in recent years.
Some of that surely has to do with better data collection......
Irma is an overwhelming hurricane, in a year we've already been overwhelmed by Hurricane Harvey.
When this type of thing happens, I do what human nature tends to do: I shut down the big picture and look at some of the picky details, which helps us all cope. The gallows humor in these situations usually helps, too.
So we turn to Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh Says Irma Is Liberal Conspiracy
Rush Limbaugh, that thundery blowhard of a radio host, informed us that week that we have nothing to worry about from Hurricane Irma.
As Slate points out, Limbaugh told us this week that liberal scientists and the media overhype and manipulate hurricane forecasts because they want to scare us into make us sign on to their "fake" global warming activism.
Slate quotes Limbaugh thusly:
"So the media benefits with the panic with increased eyeballs, and the retailers benefit from the panic with increased sales.. I don't want to mention brand names because that's not the point. Let's all it Basement Depot. Basement Depot, huge, huge, business. Basement Depot spends gazillions of dollars every year in local advertising in hurricane forced areas in order to advance their global warming agenda."
I got quite a few likes on social media this week when I suggested Limbaugh should stand on a Hurricane Irma-exposed beach to "prove" to us that the storm is just a liberal false flag.
Alas, it turns out Limbaugh is a total snowflake. He lives and broadcasts from South Florida, and he's fleeing the storm, just like many thousands of other. Sorry, no video of Rush blowing away in a rush of hurricane force winds for you!
Anyway, hang tight this weekend, Florida! We hope everybody makes it through OK
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