Entry of 8/17/2023
It has been a quiet Atlantic Hurricane Season. That is expected for an El Nino year, when wind patterns tend to throw sheer at the storms, messing up their plans to become giant rotating vortices of chaos and destruction. Not sure if “vortices” is a word. Anyway, it is now* expected, according to NOAA, that wind sheer is going to lose to super heated ocean surface, allowing the rest of the 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Seasons to blow up to be bad.
Here, let us begin to record the high points of the season. I’ll start:
After days of quiescence, there are suddenly two stormy bits emerging off the coast of Africa. They each have a 70% chance of developing into a storm. They will be moving over very warm water.
*My friend and colleague Michael Mann and his research group had already predicted this, well before the start of the season. He has an excellent track record. The longest range and thus least reliable spaghetti map projections suggest that one of them will curve up into the midst of the North Atlantic. The same not very reliable projections allow for other stormy blog moving farther west and not recurring over the next several days, which leaves open the possibility of a meaningful relationship with land.
That is all for now, keep an eye out. As it were.
Entry of 8/28/23
This is a google map screenshot of Horsdhoe Beach, Florida. The average elevation at the surface here is 7 feet. Most of the homes are on stilts. The expected storm surge, estimated two days in advance, so this may be very inaccurate, is over 9 feet.
At the moment, this community is almost exactly at the expected eye landfall of Hurricane Idalia.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
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Not sure if “vortices” is a word.
It is — similar to “indices” and “matrices”.
There’s a book by César N. Caviedes that might interest you: El Niño in History: Storming through the Ages (University Press of Florida, 2001)
That’s if you don’t already know about it…
Sure is a word, used to describe spiral of air that form at surface discontinuities.
Examples are those deliberate;y created on aircraft aerofoils in order to improve boundary layer control and thus preserve lift. Dog-tooth wing leading edges Hawker Hunter, F4 Phantom, wing fences DH Sea Vixen, vortex generators spanwise on aircraft as on the Blackburn Buccaneer and the recent use at wing tips by upturns at tips.