Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Dean to Strike Mainland Mexico

It's been a while since I've posted about Hurricane Dean. But I did hear one interesting prognostication about where Hurricane Dean is going. He's going to hit Texas. Then California. Then Washington and Oregon. Then South Dakota. Then Michigan. Then right up to Washington, DC and into the White House!! YEAH!!!!! Right. Hurricane Dean. Howacane Dean. Howane Dean. Howard Dean.

Actually, it is pretty much following the paths of all those "0 Type" runs of the GFS that I have been talking about in this blog. It went through the Caribbean, making a mess out of Jamaica. Then it hit Yucatan this morning, making a direct hit with 155 mph winds on Chetumal. It will go into the Bay of Campeche and charge into mainland Mexico at about Tampico and be reduced immediately to a 20 mph wimp of a storm, but not before it causes catastrophic damage to some places. The people in Houston and the rest of the country are breathing easier that it did not hit any oil wells or refineries in or near coastal Texas. The Space Shuttle Atlantis came down a day early, but got some fantastic pictures of Dean and landed well, despite the presence of this Category 5 hurricane.

This is what the media have been saying. But they have not been saying something else. Not Channel 12 in Richmond. Not CNN. Not any news site on the Web. But the bloggers (and The Oil Drum)have been saying it all over the place. Hurricane Dean is endangering the world oil supply. It is headed straight for Cantarell oil field, where it will strike with hurricane force. If Dean destroys the oil drilling equipment at Cantarell, Pemex may decide it is not economical to rebuild it. That would cut off 1.7 million barrels a day from the world market, and would probably cause oil to increase in price. But as of yesterday and today, oil has actually been dropping in price. Don't the wizards on Wall Street and other places know about Cantarell?

There is another threat out there, Invest 92L. So far it is just a mass of clouds, and GFS doesn't do anything with it. For a while I thought it was this after storm that I had been tracking and giving a GFS string for. But that storm simply disappeared. I don't think much is going to happen to it. NOAA says conditions are not favorable for development. The Canadian model develops it, sends it to central Florida and then northwestern Florida and Alabama (a Type 4), but that's the only model that shows anything of the storm, except for a shadow on MM5. So right now Dean is the main game. He could have a substantial impact on the price of fuels.

I have also been watching the Arctic ice sheet. The rapid melting of this sheet continues, especially near Alaska and eastern Russia. There has actually been a slight increase in the cover on the other side, towards Europe. But this is the most the ice sheet has even shrunk. It just barely covers half the Arctic ocean. This shows that global warming is definitely happening, and it is probably due to human burning of fossil fuels.

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