I’ve been getting a few worried queries on Facebook from people that want my opinion about the “Mega-storm packing 150 mph winds and 50-foot waves set to pummel West Coast” that has been making the rounds as seen below:
What is your take on this storm coming into the West coast areas of Washington, Oregon and California. 50 ft waves and 150 mph winds. worse that the 1962 storm?
When I saw that headline, I cringed, because the author from a website called Medium, one Kevin Thomas Hulten, says he is a FEMA-certified disaster PIO, an award-winning publisher/reporter & founder of the Bay Area-based strategic communication firm K15n. is using the image of Typhoon Songda at it’s strongest on October 11th, along with the effects of a typhoon at that strength “50 ft waves and 150 mph winds” in a headline that suggests these effects will hit the West Coast of the USA.
He’s not just wrong, he’s irresposnibly wrong in my opinion; if he really is trained by to be a “FEMA-certified disaster PIO”, he should know better. Unless of course, hype is part of that FEMA training. The data simply doesn’t support his wild claim. For example, here is the current bulletin up on the NWS Seattle home page:
A factual story in the Seattle Times was much less alarming:
“This is one of those rare cases where (a typhoon) just happened to get swept up in the right way and get in an environment where it could grow again right off our coast,” Bond said. “When everything comes together like that — look out.”
On Thursday, computer models showed the storm passing directly over Western Washington, said Kirby Cook, science officer for the National Weather Service in Seattle. But even small shifts in the storm track can change which areas will be hit hardest, he cautioned.
Pressure measurements show a very intense low at the heart of the storm, which means high winds. But the pressures aren’t quite as low as those that spawned the (1962) Columbus Day storm.
“This doesn’t look as strong as that, right now,” Cook said. “But it may very well end up being the strongest storm we’ve had in the last five to 10 years.”
Gosh, compare these two quotes:
“FEMA Certified Disaster PIO” Kevin Thomas Hulten says –
Packing 150 mph sustained winds, a storm some meteorologists are calling the “biggest storm in history” will hit coastal regions of the U.S. this Saturday,generating 45-foot waves, and dumping multiple feet of rainfall across an area including three states and two countries.
NWS science officer Kirby Cook says –
…the strongest storm we’ve had in the last five to 10 years.
The graphic provide by the Times is very instructive:
And here is a Tweet from a couple of days ago by the NWS Seattle, that shows what the storm looks like now as a strong extra-tropical low pressure system:
Satellite loop of past 3 days showing transition from ridge to stormy pattern in the Pacific NW. #wawx pic.twitter.com/z75XNFKf9i
— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) October 14, 2016
Compare that image of the low approaching the coast to the typhoon picture used in the Medium story by Kevin Thomas Hulten and I think you’ll agree they look nothing alike.
Compare the measured wind speed of 52mph at sea by a ship off the coast of Seattle to “packing 150 mph winds”:
Low offshore still has considerable deepening to do, but vessel on back side of it had sustained wind of 52 mph near 38.6 N 138.1 W. #wawx pic.twitter.com/v1YaSTii9t
— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) October 15, 2016
It seems though, some “journalists” just can’t help but generate clickbait.
Mashable’s Andrew Freedman fell into that trap yesterday, and I called him out on it:
Worse than we thought! There's DNA in Super Typhoons now, breeding at sea, apparently. pic.twitter.com/xIcYRHE6v0
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) October 14, 2016
Here is the graphic from that Tweet, click to enlarge:
In my opinion, these doomster journalists do the world a great disservice when they print hype like that, because when the “super typhoon” and 150 mph winds and 50 foot waves don’t materialize in Seattle and nearby areas, people will remember that the warnings didn’t match reality, and the next time a big storm comes through, they might not take it seriously enough to prepare because the last one was such a bust.
It’s called “warning fatigue” (something NOAA recognizes) combined with fixation on something that is pointless entertainment. And, it isn’t just in the USA, Britain has it too.
My friend Mike Smith speaks of this problem in his book Warnings: The true story of how science tamed the weather.
I’ve read it, and I’ve lived and experienced much of what he’s written about in the quest to make forecasting, especially severe weather forecasting, more accurate, timely, and specific. For those of us that prefer practical approaches over the rampant speculation on mere wisps of connections to climate this book is for you.
Interestingly, while “warning fatigue” was well known long ago when too many weather bulletins occur and the populace tunes out because they weren’t personally affected, so it goes today with the increasingly shrill climate warnings we see in the media.
The public is starting to tune those out too.
It did not arrive? Another dirty trick of global warming.
Cliff Mass …
As I will describe in a future blog, this was not a failure so much of the models, but of communication of uncertainty. My profession has to stop providing the worst case or most probable weather evolution, but provide society with full probabilistic guidance. Yesterday was a good example of the failure mode when we do not. The media, such as the Seattle Times and several TV stations, were happy to hype up the storm because of all the interest in such events. Many events were unnecessarily cancelled or postponed, some on Friday or Saturday morning when there was no chance of strong winds.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-short-comment-about-storm.html
To some extent over hyping is just CYA. If the government agencies are too conservative and people die they will have their butts raked over the PR coals. If they over hype their butts are covered. The press won’t hold them accountable if during a later storm people that have heard it all before and don’t believe them and thus stay and perish.
Was 7 in ’62, living in SW Portland. Was after school playing in a friend’s tree fort at about 25-30 ft, when my mom came to pick me & my bicycle up for the short drive home – she got the storm warning. The greenish sky hit less than an hour later, when I was at home. My dad had contracted for all 5 of our mature pine trees to be topped, 2 yrs earlier, so NONE of ours toppled! All our neighbors who didn’t top their mature pine trees lost them, uprooting big sections of their yard, driveway or patios — a few falling on their houses or across our street. We were out of school for a week as the city repaired the power grid. All in all, quite an sap-smelly adventure that I looked for a repeat in 12OCT63? JFK was killed in Nov’63 so I quit looking in subsequent 12OCTs storms after that…
Here in Central Oregon, we’ve had a fair bit of rain, but certainly no flooding. Max wind gust was 44 mph, on Thursday, in the Bend area. Although I staked my dwarf fruit trees, no damage occurred.
With respect to high winds incoming on the Oregon Coast, it’s a comedy that anyone would think high winds are unusual. Or flooding. And I don’t recall anyone living there ever called them a “typhoon”. We called them “storms”. Some worse than others, of course.
This Bend newspaper references a 175-mile-per-hour gust recorded in 1971 at Mt. Hebo, just off the Oregon Coast: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1243&dat=19710115&id=YAFYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=JfcDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2002,3879976
Lest anyone doubt this report is factually correct, I can report I was standing directly next to the wind-speed recorder that night and personally observed the trace as it rose to a max speed of 175 mph.
Was that the highest speed of the wind that night? Very likely. But no one will ever know because the entire wind gauge array blew away just a few moments later.
Got our first decent rain for the 2016 – 2017 water year. It settled the dust real nice so I had a reasonably pleasant time refurbing an animal pen during some sunny breaks on Saturday. Sunday I worked out in the rain doing various odds and ends – it was nice not to be pouring sweat for once. Bring it!
50′ waves? Mere babies! During WW II the US Submarine ‘Tang’ got caught on the surface in a typhoon during her 5ht and what would turn out to be her final patrol. The events described here occurred Oct 6th and 7th of 1944.
http://www.ss563.org/306/tang5.html
From an account by Commander Dick O’Kane as skipper of the US submarine ‘Tang’ during WW II from when his Sub was caught on the surface in a powerful Typhoon east of Formosa (now Taiwan) and south of the Ryukyus islands. Paragraphs are transcribed from his book ‘Clear the Bridge’ which IMO is the greatest nonfiction description of a submarine during the war in the Pacific.
A barometer reading taken just before the watch was brought in and the boat was sealed showed 27.8 inches. A few minutes later the sub rolled 70 degrees before a huge wave and managed to recover. He writes:
“When submerged, looking through the scope gives the viewer the impression that his eye is just above the surface of the sea, at the position of the lens. When the boat is on the surface, it’s like looking down from a 55-foot tower. I was looking up at a single monstrous wave, so big it had normal waves on it’s crest, which were blowing out into spume as it rolled in. Reflexes made me duck momentarily just before it hit, and then green water, solid green sea, went over the top of everything, burying ‘Tang’ scope and all. I had expected a mangled tube, if indeed it was not broken off above the roots, Jones lowered away lest the next wave finish it off.”…………..
“…….. Our present position was untenable, for we were being pushed ahead in addition to our own turns, and our total speed likely equaled the advance of storm. We could thus remain in this dangerous semicircle for days, even into the Ryukyus to the immediate north…..”
O’Kane managed to get his boat through a 180 degree turn so as to head into the waves and wind and thus the sub was saved. He could not dive in such seas without taking a great chance of losing control of the boat so they rode it out just making steerage into the waves and the wind. When the seas and winds moderated enough to open the hatch they didn’t know if they were in the eye or if they had passed beyond the storm. They had to use their compressors to equalize the pressure in the boat before they could budge the hatch.
Later the officers discussed what they had been through:
“……I recalled an experience at sea with a hurricane packing 100-knot winds and spoke conservatively when I estimated that the winds of this typhoon had half again the speed. In the height of the seas, there was no comparison. We were not just guessing, for in the Quartermaster’s Notebook were recorded various periods during which the scope had been completely buried, the longest being 14 seconds. Sketching the wave crests in their most modest form and arriving at their speed from the recorded frequency, ‘Tang’s’ Jr. Officers calculated that on occasions a minimum of 40 feet of sea had rolled above the lens of our scope. I would not dispute their figure nor would Frank [Executive officer and navigator], we had seen the waves, and 95 feet from crest to trough seemed conservative.”
‘Tang’ would go on during this patrol into the Formosa (now Taiwan) strait to set a single patrol record for the sinking of enemy ships. But would be sunk by her last remaining torpedo when it malfunctioned and circled around and hit, sinking the sub. Unlike the majority of submarine sailors whose sub was sunk, O’Kane and some others survived the sinking and their subsequent incarceration by the Japanese.