You might be without power for a few days. The most important items are water and food. Plus blankets to say dry and warm.

There are a lot of people keeping you in their thoughts and good wishes for a safe journey through the storm.

Stafe safe and you are being thought about.

Good wishes,
Yaakoba

Miss. Coast newspaper: http://www.sunherald.com/201/story/801077.html

Thank you for your important observation – Cuba got hammered over the whole length of the island – is Cuba still being ignored in the US? If Trudeau was alive, we Canadians would probably start mobilizing a major humanitarian effort… (well, why don’t we do it anyway?)

And what about DR/Haiti ?

A realistic and skeptical view is compatible with humanist ethics (isn’t that what Freeman Dyson says?)

These are nice displays, thanks for posting them.

I have a general (TV) meteorology question: Why do most weather animations only show a very small timespan? I would really love to see a 24 hour weather pattern to get a better understanding of what is happening in various places as the day progresses.

I get a little frustrated by TV weather shows with a very fast animation and a short total timespan. At least yours is showing 12 pictures that look to try for 30-60 minutes each picture, but an option for a longer time period would be awesome. Not sure if it’s a bandwidth consideration, though.

Or: why did Gustav not regain strength over the Gulf?

In a word: Dry air entrainment.

Okay, three words.

This is why I like the water vapor images at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.shtml . When Gustav entered the GoM, there was a north/south stretch of dry air over the western Gulf. I thought it was far enough away, but Gustav managed to suck it in.

When a hurricane is recovering from shear, once that reduces, all it has to do is rebuild the top of the storm. When dry air is sucked into the middle part of the storm, convection collapses and convection has to rebuild from the surface. Also, the dry means that less condensation occurs, so less heat is released to feed the storm.

When intense huricanes pull in dry air, it seems to take them 2-3 days to recover, and Gustav was still feeling the indigestion when it reached land.

I’ll have to watch and see if it’s updated in a timely way.
If it is, it’s a keeper.

http://www.stormpulse.com/

A few interesting observations from that map. Looks like not only was the Gulf warmer in 2005, but so was the Atlantic overall. Of course, the Pacific was too, given that it was not going to flip over to Cool for another three years. The Indian Ocean, however, was slightly cooler then than today. Also there is less warm water around the Arctic regions too. The pool of cold waters, around what I would surmise to be the ice shelf, is a lot bigger today than it was then. Of the warm areas that have generally stayed the same between the two graphics, such as off the Pacific coast of South America, the heat seems to be slightly more concentrated in that area and in similar areas. What strikes me also is to find much of the warmest SSTs in high northerly latitudes, while the southerly latitudes have cooled somewhat. Interesting.

The wind stopped. Most everybody in the neighborhood bailed outside at the same time, looking around. We all knew what it was.

The amazing thing to me were all the birds. Had never seen anything like it. They were thick: high in the air and down low, flitting from branch to branch in the bushes and trees. All of them were moving in the same direction. They looked tired.

I’ve often wondered where along the way the line the storm picked them up. I lived only a couple of blocks off the beach and when the storm made landfall it had been over the gulf for days. Had they been in flight that long? Did the storm pick them up in Cuba? Had it sucked them in as it skirted Florida and Alabama? What’s up with that?