Alberto
It looks like the hurricane season has started again, at almost the same time as last year, with last year's storm being Arlene, and this year's Alberto. Will this year mimic last year? If so, New Orleans needs to beware Hurricane Kirk coming on August 29. It certainly is not a good start. Here they come.
It first started out as a depression in the Caribbean which the National Hurricane Center said would develop into a minimal, or Class 1, tropical storm. (See my earlier blog for these classes; I have changed their name from categories to classes because people are now using "category" to mean winds exceeding 74 miles per hour. ) I looked at the GFDL model and it said that the storm would go off the Atlantic coast and would become a Category 3 hurricane. I felt that the prediction of such a puny storm was seriously underrating it, and I was right. Instead of languishing at 40 mph, its winds have speeded to 70 mph, making it a Class 4 tropical storm.
So maybe some parts of Florida will get some gales. Their trees won't blow down; that is, if they are palms. The pines will blow down, of course, and cause many power outages. But this is not even a hurricane, let alone a Katrina. But what is the media doing? Especially CNN and Fox News? They are hyping it up and hurricaning it up on all the news channels. CNN is playing the hurricane music, and not much of anything else gets covered. They are treating Alberto as though it were Katrina or Rita. That leaves no room for emphasizing the severity of high category storms like my hypothetical Kirk above, and people will tend to downplay such a Kirk, and if such a Kirk were to to once again put New Orleans under water and cause massive destruction, this time around, because of the lack of appropriate publicity, more people will die. So please pipe down, media. This is not even a hurricane yet.
And fortunately the NHC outlook, after referring to Alberto, says, "Tropical storm formation is not expected through Tuesday." I hope it stays that way.
It first started out as a depression in the Caribbean which the National Hurricane Center said would develop into a minimal, or Class 1, tropical storm. (See my earlier blog for these classes; I have changed their name from categories to classes because people are now using "category" to mean winds exceeding 74 miles per hour. ) I looked at the GFDL model and it said that the storm would go off the Atlantic coast and would become a Category 3 hurricane. I felt that the prediction of such a puny storm was seriously underrating it, and I was right. Instead of languishing at 40 mph, its winds have speeded to 70 mph, making it a Class 4 tropical storm.
So maybe some parts of Florida will get some gales. Their trees won't blow down; that is, if they are palms. The pines will blow down, of course, and cause many power outages. But this is not even a hurricane, let alone a Katrina. But what is the media doing? Especially CNN and Fox News? They are hyping it up and hurricaning it up on all the news channels. CNN is playing the hurricane music, and not much of anything else gets covered. They are treating Alberto as though it were Katrina or Rita. That leaves no room for emphasizing the severity of high category storms like my hypothetical Kirk above, and people will tend to downplay such a Kirk, and if such a Kirk were to to once again put New Orleans under water and cause massive destruction, this time around, because of the lack of appropriate publicity, more people will die. So please pipe down, media. This is not even a hurricane yet.
And fortunately the NHC outlook, after referring to Alberto, says, "Tropical storm formation is not expected through Tuesday." I hope it stays that way.
posted by Jim at 8:40 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home