This live and real-time radar stream is coming directly from the National Weather Service WSR-88D NEXRAD network and is provided as a free public service of The Heartland Institute and WUWT.
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Indisputable evidence that Ian was only a cat. 2 hurricane.
Suddenly, Ian is the 4th strongest hurricane in Florida history?
NO IT WASN’T!
Here, let me PROVE it wasn’t. Not even close to a top 10 hurricane for Florida!
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/89131/#89321
Though always skeptical of the claims from the NHC and the hype of the weather channel, after seeing their inflation of the power of Irma back in 2017, I have no doubt that Ian was a very powerful storm at landfall and I am not buying the claims being made here that it was not a major hurricane.
rah,
Nobody is disputing it did tremendous damage but where is any data to show that winds were 150 mph sustained at landfall or even 120 mph at landfall? I looked everywhere. A few places along the coast had wind gusts above 100 mph. The measured empirical data is the data. Using data, completely takes out the emotions, sensationalism, embellishment AND any denial or skeptism.
The very fact that several of the anemometers of the land stations were taken out by this storm speaks volumes to me. If you cannot find the data for faster wind speeds the obviously the measurements were not being taken at the right place.
For Irma there seemed to be far more buoys and land stations that were in the right places that made me sure that it was not a CAT III but a middle of the road CAT II before it came ashore.
But this time was a different matter from what I see. Sure you can say what you want about what metrics you have. And you can point out that hurricanes are graded based on 1 minute sustained winds taken by an unmasked station 10 meters above surface level as per the classic Saffir-Simpson metric.
But unlike you apparently, I also judge a storms power based on things like surge and damage, allowing for the circumstances of terrain, development, etc. IOW something like what Joe Bastardi calls his “impact scale”. And based on that no one is going to convince me that Ian was less than a top end CAT III if not a CAT IV.
Exactly. Failure of ground based stations is very common. Take KPGD for example, it recorded 123 mph gust and then went offline. It didn’t even get a chance to measure the most intense part of the storm. Buoys have the same problem. The most effective way to observe the eye wall is either by recon aircraft who instruments can survive to tell the tale.
Binning all hurricanes into 5 bins makes no sense to me. Gilbert and Andrew were very different. Looks like storm surge was the most destructive force.
I cannot find 150 mph at landfall. I can only find 140 mph at landfall per the AF307 observation. There is a good chance the NHC will adjust the landfall intensity downward. However, NOAA2 and AF301 observed 157 mph prior to landfall so there’s a chance (probably not good) that it will upgrade the peak intensity to category 5.
That brings mobile audio amp manufacturers quoting peak watts instead of watts RMS to mind.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they upgraded it to a CAT V like they did Michael after reanalysis. They need the propaganda value.
Michael was an open and shut case due to the 152 kts (175 mph) SFMR measurement and the fact that the NOAA aircraft didn’t even intercept the band of maximum winds. Due to communication issues the recon data from that flight didn’t make it to the NHC office in real-time so the NHC did not get the opportunity to review it until after the fact.
I’ve not heard of communication issues with the recon data for Ian. The big question for me is the radar data which was showing sustained 175 kts flight level winds which would typically indicate a category 5 hurricane. Note that radar was only observing 155 kts for Michael. If the post storm analysis shows that the radar data is viable then it is possible we see an upgrade. But I don’t think that outcome is likely. I think is more likely that we actually see a downgrade of the landfall intensity due to the much lower SFMR measurement of 121 kts vs the 137 kts and the dropsonde of 126 kts vs 131 kts at landfall and peak intensity respectively. Ian was weakening during landfall. However, there is a lot of data that is unavailable in real-time that could take weeks to review. And the NHC will want to review instrumentation to see if it was accurate. That all takes time.
Seen two reports from hurricane hunters saying Ian gave them the roughest ride they have had in their careers. It also had the most lightning. One was on a C-130 the other on a WP-3D.
The C-130 experienced severe up and down drafts and the WP-3D severe lateral turbulence. The WP-3D went in at night and the guy said the eye was lighted up like day from the lightning. No ones coffee survived apparently.
I saw a satellite view of that or maybe it was from one of the planes, and the lightning was incredible!
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What I noticed was it seemed most of the lightning was in the South, Southeast, and East areas of Ian and a lot of it was in the outer band. The eye was lit up almost constantly.
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I don’t know enough about hurricanes to say why that was happening.
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We Snowbird in a 5th-wheel between Clearwater and St. Petersburg, a little over a mile from the coast. You can leave or take your trailer and this year we left it (aack!) so we could go down a few extra times during the year.
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That’s why I was noticing that the lightning just wasn’t happening above what is more or less a West to East centerline through the storm. I’m sure someone here knows why that happened that way.
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A Florida neighbor called with the damage report yesterday for our rig and our area he didn’t say anything about lightning damage. (We lost one tire cover off our rig. That was the damage report. $10. Yay!)
P.S. Our rig was 81 miles as the crow flies from the center of the eye at landfall. The wind (ground, not the hurricane height) was 43 mph average with gusts to 70 mph.
I have no idea what that says about the classification of hurricane Ian.
That’s about what would be expected based on the 15Z advisory from the NHC.
Plenty of post-storm photos of damage from Ian. Entirely consistent with Saffir-Simpson Category 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale
The SW Florida landfall was unusual in several ways.
The oblique angle where the eastern eyewall was over land for some time with lower than Category 1 winds in the 50 knots range. At that time the western eyewall was over water with 70 knot winds.
Ian then turned from a northerly track toward the east. Peak storm winds in the trailing eyewall were stronger with sustained winds being recorded at 71 knots or 36.6 meters per second. The time was 21.10 by NDBC shore station VENF1 on the 28th.
Anemometer height 11.6 meters above site elevation. This is the only reliable surface station that actually recorded sustained winds satisfying claims that Ian was a hurricane.
earthnullschool showed similar winds at the same time in that location, but was not recorded to my knowledge.
Sampling of NWS stations during the storm showed no winds of hurricane force at any time.
The Saffir-Simpson scale for category 1 exactly matches the photos of surface damage due to sustained winds. Weak structures, mobile homes, etc, could have significant damage.
Plenty of photos of trees and palms with minor damage consistent with category 1 winds.
By far the majority of damage is from storm surge flooding, which has nothing to do with the category ranking of hurricanes on the Saffir-Simpson scale. All this happened while the NHC was claiming category 4, which is clearly impossible. If winds were 150 mph then the entire land surface would have been scraped flat, like Andrew in 1992, which was a legit Category 5, where no surface anemometers survived the storm. I crossed the damage path of Andrew a few weeks after and it looked like an atomic bomb had gone off.
Anyone who claims Ian was a major hurricane is clueless. There is no comparison in observed surface damage.
The evidence shows Ian was a Category 1 hurricane at landfall, based on observations that anyone can check for themselves.
By the way, the NHC claims that Ian was Cat 1 at the S. Carolina landfall. Nonsense. There is no data that shows sustained winds over 45 knots anywhere in the storm path approaching South Carolina or by land based anemometers on the coast. Earthnullschool clearly showed a much weaker tropical storm at that time.