The Battle of New Orleans: Climate-Change Edition

Also note from the solen.info index page on space weather state for 9-10 July (above): the solar wind speed jumped from its solar minimum leisurely 300-400 kps pace up to ~ 500-600 kps during that time 24 hours before Barry organized itself with circulation. The connection is much clearer though in late August-September-October data than it is in June-July and November (the heart of the Atlantic basin hurricane season).

Again, I have no idea what the mechanism is linking this Atlantic Basin tropical cyclone development facilitation to the Ap/Kp index is. But it is there, as long as the ENSO ONI is less than |0.7| (absolute ONI < 0.7). Hurricane Michael last year, look it up:
Ap/Kp spike 8-10 Oct 2018:
http://www.solen.info/solar/old_reports/2018/october/20181009.html
and Hurricane Michael:
https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/atlantic/2018/Post-Tropical-Cyclone-Michael

September-October + ONI ++tropical conditions/strengthening rapidly.
And on and on and on all the way back to 1950. Every single major strengthening period for an Atlantic basin hurricane, almost certainly was preceded 24-48 hrs by an Ap/Kp spike… as long as ENSO ONI < 0.7 absolute value (that is, not signif. El Nino or La Nina conditions).

But some smart meteorological/space weather/modeling folks like Maue, Spencer, Christy, JoeB could probably figure it out in a collaboration with the modelling and historical data. Just sayin'.

re: “T/S Barry organization is solar geomagnetic related for 1-2 days ago. ”

I’ll take “False Correlation” for 200 dollars Alex …

Except ample rain is exactly the opposite of what alarmists have long claimed for the world in general and this area specifically and in particular.
Spring flooding has been a fact of life along this river since people moved to live near and farm the rich soil of it’s floodplain.
NEWSFLASH: People that live in the floodplain, delta, and outwash regions of rivers than drain entire continents are gonna have flooding.
Film at 11:00

Why is it, do you suppose, that this river (and it many tributaries) is the most managed waterway on Earth?

Thousands upon thousands of miles of levees, floodgates, locks, dams, and all manner of flood control measures exist on this waterway.
It is not because they have been planning ahead for the flood that had never happened and now finally has.
Channelizing a mature meandering river on a floodplain, one which has always carried a huge sediment load, and preventing it from doing what is natural and normal and healthy for such a river to do, which is flood the flood plain with sediment laden water, is only one of the many reasons for what has happened this year.
The river has of course always flooded. Anyone who has ever taken even a first year class in High School physical geography knows this well. It is one of the most important and relevant aspects to the daily lives of many people.
In fact the river carries so much sediment, it has regularly changed it course along the floodplain ever so often, as the stream bed becomes built up by sediment, meanders become more extreme (deposition along slow moving inner side of curves, erosion of the bank along the outside of curves), and then a flood from heavy stream flow throws the river out of its banks.
The river will spill out across the flood plain and renourish it with sediment.
As the flow returns to more normal volume, the river may find lower and more direct route downstream, and this in fact regularly happens when such a river is not messed with by building levees and keeping from doing what it wants to do. Because the previous path contains many convolutions, when these are bypassed what is seen are features called oxbow lakes. A look at an aerial shot of the Mississippi floodplain shows thousands and thousands of these, of every age, and some features that are old ones that have filled in and become part of the plain again. If the river finds an entirely new path along the floodplain, entire sections of the old stream bed will be cutoff, and these will be visible as lakes that are long and sinuous. Sometimes the river will bifurcate, and the flow will be split for a distance.
And all of this must occur for the river and floodplain to exist in the state it was in when we found it.
Anyplace that is flooded by these rivers, which have travelled the same general path for many millions of years, has flooded because they built upon the floodplain of a river.
If there is any tendency towards more frequent or worse flooding than our historical records suggest (only suggest), there is a simple explanation in that the river is channelized, it has not been about to find a lower pathway through the flood plain for a very long time, sediment is building up along the bottom of the bed every year (although at some point it may be the case that heavy flow will scour sediment off the bottom and transport it downstream), and the surrounding floodplain, cut off from it natural supply of periodic new sedimentation, is subsiding, via oxidation of organics, compaction, and groundwater withdraw.
Each of these processes that occur in a channelized mature river in a floodplain makes the potential flood if and when the river overflow the levees that much worse, as does continued construction along the path of the floodplain.
Here is a random photo of the river in it’s floodplain. Look carefully at the contours of the land outside of the river channel, and plainly visible, even after many decades of being channelized, are the features I described. Some are very old and exist only as a tracery in the land contour that farmers have plowed, some are oxbows, in various stages of their evolution towards being filled in, and some old straight channel lakes. In fact, the entire ground surface for many miles on either side of the river is overlapping layers of such features.

http://media.chicagomag.com/whet/mississippi_river_flood.jpg
Also, the Mississippi is not exactly one river. There are places where major rivers join it, and in these places, the character of the river changes. Once past the point where both the Ohio and Missouri rivers have joined the Mississippi, it changes entirely.
The flood plain is different south of St. Louis, and dramatically different south of Cairo.
Below this point the river goes from having a flood plain of a several miles width, to having a floodplain 50 to 100 miles wide. An area almost as large as the state of Tennessee.
You can seen old channels from one side to the other, most of which show up as particularly green and lush farm plots. For tens of millions of years the river has owned that whole extent.
Now it is restricted to the path it had on one particular day.
South of the confluence of the Red river, a large part of southern Louisiana was once a river delta in which the same sort of processes occurred, except that here the river would slow down and drop nearly all of it sediment load.
After while, the place where the river was doing this became not the lowest but the highest land in the delta, and so during a flood the river would find a new path, and start dropping sediment there. During big flood years, it may have spread to cover the entire delta for a while.
And this is why we see what we see there today: A huge city sitting on ground which is day by day become more compacted (and may be getting pushed down by 8mm/year from crustal loading and a hinge effect centered further inland), and so it gets a little lower every year. It is by now almost completely below sea level. The river itself is way above sea level here, and it’s kept from dropping it sediment, which is why the delta is gradually dying and receding, and the crow’s foot of sediment grows further into the Gulf, and the “dead zone” (really a zone of hypoxia due to eutrophication) where it drops it’s nutrient laden water to mix w/ the Gulf water, remains.

This entire area is several disasters waiting to happen, but none of them have anything to do with global warming, changing climates, or any of that nonsense.
River sediment is not some new thing, but pretending we are in charge of the forces of nature on our planet is.

By the time the Army corps confined the river to it’s present path, it already wanted to make a new way for itself to the Gulf, north of Baton Rouge and then trending SW, along a path roughly where the Atchafalaya river now is.
At this point, the river is far higher than the Atchafalaya river pathway.

Many felt for a very long time that the Corps of Engineers was forestalling the inevitable, and making the flooding which would someday surely throw the river from it banks and make a new channel in a more direct and lower path to the gulf, that much worse when it happened.

Personally, when I learned all of this back in High School and in great detail in college, I was sure sooner or later a flood like the worst in history would come again.
It is thought that if the river ever gets out of it’s channel, it will quickly cut a new stream bed into soft sediment and it will become nearly impossible to ever force it back.

It can be seen that the river is a continuous series of sinuous loops and curlicues, which is how every mature river on a flood plain looks. There are many miles of river for every mile of distance as the crow flies.