Prepare yourselves for the second coming of Katrina, because you can bet that this storm will be hyped as an indicator of “global warming”.
As of this writing, the storm is in the process of making landfall in the Philippines and it is moving west at 20-25 knots and estimated winds of 170 knots (195mph).
Hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue has been monitoring the Super Typhoon for the past several days and remarked about the historic nature of Haiyan. In this upper echelon of cyclone intensity, it is difficult to assign rankings or compare Typhoons due to inhomogeneous observing networks and tools. But it’s fair to say that Super Typhoon Haiyan is as intense as a tropical cyclone can get.
Presented at AMS Tropical in 2004, Hoarau et al. asked if there were any Typhoons stronger than Tip (1979). Two likely candidates emerged including Super Typhoon Angela from 1995 which has been compared with today’s storm. Satellite estimates through Dvorak technique yielded an intensity of 90 m/s or 175 knots which is greater than Tip’s maximum of 165 knots. A quick comparison between Angela and Haiyan at maximum intensity suggests the latter is actually stronger. Dvorak estimates are at the top of the scale — T = 8.0 and even touched 8.1, which according to this chart, means 170-knot maximum 1-minute sustained winds. That is Category 5 with three pluses.
The actual best-tracks have Tip at 165-knots and there are many others that exceeded 155-knots. Here’s a handy list of advisories that met or exceeded 155 since 1950. The JTWC best tracks are increasingly uncertain prior to the satellite era (1979) but there is some confidence primarily due to routine aircraft recon from 1944-1987 in the Western Pacific. Aside from field studies (e.g. TPARC) run by NASA in coordination with neighboring nations, routine hurricane hunting does not occur outside of the Western Hemisphere.
Global landfalls were discussed in a recent J. Climate paper by Weinkle, Maue and Pielke Jr. Weinkle_2012.04
![vis0[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/vis01.jpg?quality=83)
Above: as morning breaks in the Philippines, one of the first two visible satellite images
Above: animation from IntelliWeather.com showing the last 12 hours of motion as of 1PM PST 11/7/13. – may take up to a minute to load and animate, depending on your connection speed.
With winds like that, expect to see complete devastation as it makes landfall. That of course will be hyped into an AGW caused storm, just like Katrina. Al Gore and Bill McKibben are already testing lies language on Twitter. Bear in mind that we have a very short historical record of Typhoon strength, and any claims that this is the strongest storm ever need to be qualified with that fact. Nobody has any credible record of typhoon strength back more than a few decades.
I’ll add updates and additional content to this article today – Anthony
===============================================================
UPDATE1: NOAA image as Haiyan prepares to make landfall:
UPDATE2: Haiyan is expected to make it all the way to China. Maue on Twitter:
12z ECMWF model shows #Haiyan maintaining deep central pressure of 947 mb as it moves quickly west thru S. China Sea
UPDATE3: Radar image from Cebu City shows the eye of Haiyan approaching, click image for animation:
UPDATE4: Dr. Heidi Cullen of Climate Central wins the “First Haiyan BS award” with this missive.
RT @NOAA: What's fueling #SuperTyphoon #Haiyan's intensity? Deep warm water: http://t.co/tfNWljssms Via @NOAASatellites #climate
— Heidi Cullen (@HeidiCullen) November 7, 2013
As Bob Tisdale observes, there’s nothing to support this along the track of Haiyan:
Lots of the typical BS accumulating already about Typhoon Haiyan. Let’s push some of it aside and present the sea surface temperature anomalies for the early portion of Haiyan’s storm track.
There was nothing unusually warm about the sea surface temperature anomalies for the early portion of Typhoon Haiyan’s storm track last week, the week of Wednesday October 30, 2013. We’ll have to wait for Monday to see what the values were for this week.
UPDATE5: Jeff Masters, makes this claim:
Super Typhoon Haiyan has made landfall. According to PAGASA, Haiyan came ashore at 4 am local time (20 UTC) November 7, 2013 near Guiuan, on the Philippine island of Samar. At the time, Guiuan reported sustained 10-minute average winds of 96 mph, with a pressure of 977 mb. Contact has since been lost with the city. Two hours before landfall, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center assessed Haiyan’s sustained winds at 195 mph, gusting to 235 mph, making it the 4th strongest tropical cyclone in world history. Satellite loops show that Haiyan weakened only slightly, if at all, in the two hours after JTWC’s advisory, so the super typhoon likely made landfall with winds near 195 mph. This makes Haiyan the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in world history. The previous record was held by the Atlantic’s Hurricane Camille of 1969, which made landfall in Mississippi with 190 mph winds.
Sorry, no. Super Typhoon Ida in 1958 is said to have central pressure of 877mb and 200 mph 1 minute sustained winds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ida_%281958%29
C. L. Jordan (September 1959). “A Reported Sea Level Pressure of 877 MB.” (PDF). Monthly Weather Review. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
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Was just going to pop something in Tips ‘n Notes about this doozie. Fortunately for much of the Philippines, the strong winds don’t extend anywhere near as far out as Katrina’s did. for instance, Manila won’t see anything other than heavy rain (but boy, it looks like heavy rain) as 50=knot winds are only stretching out about 70 miles to the north from the centre.
However, those directly in its path need to be getting the heck out of Dodge. 200 mph AVERAGE wind speeds don’t bear thinking about. There won’t be much to return to…
“Nobody has any credible record of typhoon strength back more than a few decades.”
Wise words to keep in mind when weathering the upcoming hysteria.
I think that praying for these people in the Phillipines would be a very good idea right now.
Typhoons of this strength are unprecedented before tens of thousands of wind turbines were been erected – ergo they must be related to and with 95% certainty caused by the number of wind turbines – or have I misunderstood how the reasoning behind most of warmist ‘climate science’ works ?
Was not Tip around 1,300 miles in diameter or so with tropical storm force winds?
I don’t see that with Haiyan……..
It will not be the second coming of Katrina because it will be in Manilla, and not in some famous city in the US or Europe. Katrina was “the perfect storm” because it destroyed an iconic city (New Orleans), and thus it was ideal for filling up the disaster movie narrative pushed by AGW alarmists. After all, we don’t see disaster movies set in relatively obscure places like Lagos or Kabul, we see them destroying places that audiences all over the world will recognize, like New York and Paris…
Bob Ramar: Praying is the correct immediate response to this.
Secondly, check what we can give to the charities when the appeal comes out. The Philippine folk can’t take a direct hit from this if it stays so strong. We shouldn’t expect them to.
But thirdly let’s hope we can study this and see how the world actually does work. This has happened before and will happen again.
The storm is likely not “unprecedented”. See the literature and Internet for Typhoon “Cobra” of December, 1944. For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra_%281944%29
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42556.Halsey_s_Typhoon
Bob Ramar says:
November 7, 2013 at 1:47 pm
I think that praying for these people in the Phillipines would be a very good idea right now.
>>>>>>
You got it Bob.
Folks, people will be suffering, if not dying, in the areas impacted. AGW is a joke, but not everyone understands as we do. So we should restrict our sarcasm in respect for those in danger.
Fascinating to watch from a weather perspective but the highly populated Philippines can only pray they make it through the next few hours (coast experiencing 15m high waves). What lies beyond that will be just as bad and compounded by earlier storms this year. Disease will be rife, hampering any attempt to return to something ‘normal’.
Sadly already the glee of the ambulance chasing alarmists is palpable on twitter, as this is the event they have prayed for. Vultures circle corpses, I’ll just add my prayers to the many others here.
Nature sure has a way of making us feel small and powerless.
It’ll be horrific for anyone in the direct path, and what annoys me most is that people such as the odious Joe Romm will use these peoples’ suffering to advance his warmist agenda.
Bob Ramar says:
November 7, 2013 at 1:47 pm
I think that praying for these people in the Phillipines would be a very good idea right now.
———————
Yes indeed!
Have prayed and will continue to do so. Thank you for your comment.
If this is a sure sign of global warming (standstill) then the quietest tornado year on the record In the US is a sure sign of global cooling (standstill). We can all pick cherries. In earlier news from a nearby area I see increased frequency. It’s worse than I thought!
Bob Ramar says:
November 7, 2013 at 1:47 pm
In addition to prayer I’d add preparation.
Having lived through a cyclone, I’ve always found preparation to be more efficacious than prayer. In addition, preparation seems to serve both functions, under the old idea that “God helps those that help themselves” …
w.
I know people in the Philippines – this storm is a great concern to me. Yet just watch the alarmists rejoice at this. They will be thrilled and jumping for joy.
It’s mostly just Coriolis force, isn’t it, the hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and for that matter much of the air-mass driven winds. The equatorial air masses have greater lateral speed than the temperate ones, and when air masses drift north or south, they get a vector torque from their inertia — boom, circular motion is the end result. It doesn’t matter what the air is made of, only its viscosity matters. This is just engineering — way outside of climateers’ competence, of course.
Here is another sign of global warming – surface wind speeds slow down – blamed on afforestation or something.
Is this bad news? Is there anything co2 can’t do???
There are credible reports that hurricane Camille had winds in the ~200 mph range as it hit the Mississippi gulf coast.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070902172247AApG77a
Neil Jordan says:
November 7, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Halsey steamed into two typhoons, yet still made four stars, so that the Navy could have as many flag officers of that rank as the Army. He should have listened to this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Bryson
And IPeCaC should have, too, when he said near the end of his life:
“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”
Congratulations to WUWT on its 10,000th post!
Just posted the sea surface temperature anomalies for the early portion of Haiyan’s storm track. As one would expect (being ENSO neutral) there was nothing unusual last week. We’ll have to wait for Monday for the values for this week.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/typhoon-haiyan-sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-for-early-storm-track/
Regards
Along with its intensity, Haiyan is also very extreme in the latitude of its track. Eight degrees is about as close as typhoons, which rely upon Coriolis effects, ever get to the equator.
‘Prepare yourselves for the second coming of Katrina, because you can bet that this storm will be hyped as an indicator of “global warming”.’
Its already happening, the ‘weather is not climate’ line as long been abandon by the alarmist , who now jump on ‘anything ‘ as proof of AGW .
Hardly the sign of a ‘strong ‘ argument you have to say .
Cyclone Cobra, 1944, was about 4-6 years after some warming
over the 1930s. Perhaps it was a hiatus as now or perhaps the
cooling up to 1974 had already started. Conditions then and now
may be similar …
I’ve often thought more severe weather hits during cooling times
as storms feed on the latent heat they can extract from the water
vapour. The warmer the surface, the more water vapour in the air
and the cooler the upper air, the steeper the temperature gradient
and hence the more latent heat which can be extracted, driving a
bigger, stronger storm. Or am I somewhere way out of the ball park?
There was a huge North Sea storm documented in the early 1300s(1)
when the MWP had turned to cooling at the start of the Wolff Minimum
and little Ice Age. Is this the start for the Eddy Minimum?
(1) HAGAN, Brian: “The Little Ice Age”
Willis…
Was your cyclone experience on land or at sea? In ’68 I rode through the eye of Super Typhoon Elaine off the Philippines in a Heavy Cruiser (17k tons) and we came out with the bow pointed 7 degrees off from the rest of the ship. Exciting/terrifying – pick one.