Extreme 111° heat hits Texas; floods kill 9 in Haiti
Another round of unprecedented April heat hit the U.S. yesterday, and this time it was Texas' turn to see large sections of the state with the hottest April temperatures in over a century of record keeping. Seven major airports in Texas set all-time April high temperatures yesterday:
Amarillo, TX: 99° (old April record 98° on 4/22/1989 and 4/22/1965)
Lubbock, TX: 101° (old April record 100° on 4/16/1925 and /22/1989)
Dalhart, TX: 96° (old April record 94° on 4/22/1989)
Borger, TX: 99° (tied April record set on 4/22/1965)
Midland, TX: 104° (old April record 101° on 4/21/1989)
Abilene, TX: 104° (old April record 102° on 4/16/1925)
Childress, TX: 106° (old April record 102° on three occasions, most recently on 4/3/2011)
According to wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt, both Texas and Oklahoma came within 2°F of their all-time April state high temperature record yesterday. Altus, Oklahoma hit 104°, falling 2° short of the April state record of 106° set at the Magnum Research Station in 1972. In the Texas Mesonet, it hit 111° at Knox City 3NW, which is just 2° short of the Texas April state record of 113° set at Catarina in 1984. According to Mr. Burt, What is amazing is that Knox City is in the north-central part of the state, not down in the Rio Grande region like Catarina. The 111° would probably be pretty close to whatever the all-time hottest temp for ANY month might be in that location (probably around 115°). On Sunday this week, Nevada just missed setting their April state high temperature record, when the mercury hit 105° in Laughlin (April state record: 106° in 1989.)
Figure 1. At least 36 of the roughly 400 major U.S. cities that maintain automated weather sensors at their local airports (8%) have set or tied all-time April high temperature records so far this month. The records set yesterday in Texas are not yet in the database, and are not included on this map. Image taken from our new Record Extremes page.
Earlier this week, all-time record April heat hit large portions of Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. At least 36 of the roughly 400 major U.S. cities that maintain automated weather sensors at their local airports (8%) have set or tied all-time April high temperature records so far this month; no all-time April cold records have been set. The U.S. has been on an extraordinary pace of setting high temperature records so far in 2012. During March 2012, an astonishing 32% of all the major airports in the U.S. set all-time March high temperature records. For the year-to-date, there have been 184 new all-time monthly high temperature records set at the major airports, and 6 all-time monthly low temperature records. Not surprisingly, the period January - March this year has been the warmest such period in the U.S. since record keeping began in 1895.
Figure 2. Total precipitable water (in mm) for this morning shows a surge of moisture moving westwards though the Caribbean. Precipitable water values in excess of 51 mm (2 inches, orange colors) are capable of generating heavy flooding rains. Image credit: University of Wisconsin CIMSS.
Heavy rains kill nine in Haiti
The rainy season has begun on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, where heavy rains that began on Monday have triggered mudslides and floods that killed nine people. Nearly 500,000 people are still homeless in Haiti from the January 2010 earthquake, making the country highly vulnerable to flooding disasters. Heavy flooding was also a problem this week in the neighboring Dominican Republic, where 11,000 people were evacuated; no deaths were reported there, however. Precipitation forecasts from the GFS model suggest that the worst is over for Hispaniola, with the axis of greatest moisture expected to move west of the island today. This surge of moisture will bring heavy rains to Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, and South Florida during the remainder of the week.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Not quite. There was not a continuous series of tornadoes over that 4 days, and as such, it was a tornado outbreak sequence, not a single tornado outbreak. This has been confused many many times and has led to improper comparisons between last spring's big event and previous outbreaks.
There remains a larger proportion of violent tornadoes in the April 1974 outbreak than the April 27 2011 outbreak.
Safety equipment is designed to keep you safe IN A CAR ACCIDENT. It is designed to absorb certain impacts in a certain manner. In a tornado, you will be getting impacts from all directions - frequently at the same time.
Also, you have not addressed most of ScottLincoln's concens in your post.
What about the traffic?
What about traffic and wreckage preventing emergency vehicles from reaching those in need?
What about running from one storm only to meet another?
What about RFDs?
Simply put, staying in your car during a tornado is foolhardy, selfish, and short-sighted. If you look at it through a microscope, its a good idea. But if you open your eyes and look at the whole picture, you will see that is definitely not a good idea - there is a reason it has been officially recommended against for years.
That said, if you choose to stay in your car during a tornado, by all means, go for it. While I wouldn't wish ill upon anyone, especially their death, I'm sure that someone staying in their car during a tornado is more likely to end up as a Darwin award recipient, than someone who got into a ditch.
Which you have no way of determining in realtime.
Look at an actual, surveyed tornado track, not a start-point-to-end-point track. Tornado tracks may appear relatively straight, but move around on the neighborhood scale. As such, down-to-the-neighborhood (and even town, in some cases) scale is just not forecastable.
Even if it were, we wouldn't know the 1/100 tornado with high certainty, and people in the 99/100 tornadoes would try it too, potentially increasing the death toll.
Which, oddly enough, is how most people misinterpret statistics to confuse weather and climate.
I see parallels in this kind of stuff all the time, almost daily.
Well it was cold last week -> I heard of a person who outran a tornado
instead of...
Most places are experiencing warmer temperatures at an increase rate -> More people will die in the open or in vehicles than those on lowest floor, interior room.
You aren't the only one.
Cool image. Models want to do something with it, but nothing grand. Upper levels too hostile. But, being April and with such a concentration in the Caribbean, certainly interesting to see.
Looks like the Bahamas may get a good soaking. We are having the Air Show in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. They have spent tons of money on it. It was cancelled one year because it rained. The vendors and promoters lost a fortune. It is very overcast here already.
I never lose my temper.
It's hard to pray against rain this time of year, especially in Florida! But, I hope your event does well.
I'll be in Ft Lauderdale next month for the Governor's Hurricane Conference. I go every year. Beautiful city!
You just call in orbital strikes or something similar.
Are you a Governor? They are having it at the Broward County Convention Center. Maybe I will see you there. I will be easy to identify. I will be the only one there not losing his temper. :)
LOL!!! No. Just a guy in charge of emergency management for his city.
Oh they mean an inverted trough. Those are coastal troughs created by onshore winds coupled with land and sea differences. They usually form on the SE quadrant of intense high pressure systems along(or just off of) coastal plains facing the east. I'm assuming The Central Waters is what y'all refer to as the central Texas coastline?
I would often tell him he needed relaxation therapy so he wouldn't be angry all the time. He obviously didn't listen.
Now that is interesting. I should write to you off-blog and tell you some of the methods we have implemented here in Broward since Wilma. We could exchange ideas.
Sounds good to me.
An insult can often be hidden under a veil of a compliment. It is quite often much more effective and lasts longer. You are probably too young to remember William F. Buckley. He was a master of the art, similar to Churchill.
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What He said...
Ahhh...I remember William F. Buckley. He was the epitome of erudite elucidation.
Uh oh, I'm beginning to suspect Grothar and I are equally ancient.
Tropical cyclones like Irene are predicted to be more powerful this year, thanks to natural conditions, but researchers disagree on how to rate that intensity.
Atmospheric researchers tend to agree that tropical cyclones of unusual ferocity are coming this century, but the strange fact is that there is no consensus to date on the five-point scale used to classify the power of these anticipated storms. In what may sound like a page from the script of the rock-band spoof Spinal Tap with its reference to a beyond-loud electric guitar amplifier volume 11, there is actually talk of adding a sixth level to the current Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, on which category 5 intensity means sustained winds higher than 155 miles per hour (250 kilometers per hour) for at least one minute, with no speed cap.
The lack of an upper limit on the scale results in all of the most intense tropical cyclones getting lumped together, despite their wide range of power. Category 5 becomes less descriptive when it includes 2005's Emily, which reached peak wind speeds of 257.5 kph (160 mph) and six hours in category 5; the same year's Katrina which held peak wind velocity of 280 kph (175 mph) for 18 hours in the category; and 1980's Allen, churning with peak winds at 305 kph (190 mph) maintained for 72 hours in the highest category.
And now the ferocity forecast for the century adds to this classification problem. "The severe hurricanes might actually become worse. We may have to invent a category 6," says David Enfield, a senior scientist at the University of Miami and former physical oceanographer at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This new level wouldn't be an arbitrary relabeling. Global satellite data from the past 40 years indicate that the net destructive potential of hurricanes has increased, and the strongest hurricanes are becoming more common—especially in the Atlantic. This trend could be related to warmer seas or it could simply be history repeating itself. Data gathered earlier than the 1970s, although unreliable, show cycles of quiet decades followed by active ones. The quiet '60s, '70s and '80s ended in 1995, the year that brought Felix and Opal, among others, and resulted in $13 billion in damages and more than 100 deaths in the U.S.
The pros and cons of categories: Five or six?
The average difference between the current categories equals nearly 20 mph, so a category 6 label would likely be applied to hurricanes with sustained winds over (280 kph) 175 mph. The speed and destruction of hypothetical "category 6" storms is speculative, despite the hurricanes with winds at that level.
After all, meteorologists and climate researchers may not even choose a category 5 storm from the record books if asked to identify the most powerful tropical cyclone in history, because the Saffir–Simpson scale fixates on maximum wind speed lasting for at least one minute and disregards the many other large-scale components that factor into a storm's level of devastation. The whole index should be thrown out the hurricane-proof window, some say.
"If I could do it, I would do away with categories," says Bill Read, director of NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC). "The whole indexing [of hurricanes] was done back in the '60s and '70s when we had no way to convey the variables of damage that the storm did. We didn't measure it that carefully; we didn't have the tools."
Even nowadays, instruments to measure actual wind speed are often destroyed during extreme storms, so estimates have to be extrapolated from satellite images and other data. Actual observations can also be suspect. It took 14 years for the World Meteorological Organization to acknowledge that an anemometer in Australia recorded a world record wind speed of 407 kph (253 mph) during Tropical Cyclone Olivia in 1996. Wind speed science has improved over the years. Since the 1990s direct wind measurements from hurricane-hunter aircraft have replaced central pressure measurements, which were often a proxy for wind speeds.
Variables used by meteorologists and climatologists to assess damage can go beyond wind speeds to include duration over land and the extent of deadly storm surges. Read sums it up this way: "Size matters: Katrina, Rita, Ike—all of them made landfall at a 2 or 3 level, but look at the damage they caused. Obviously a category did not accurately describe the impact."
A transition to "impact forecasting" began last year when NOAA's National Hurricane Center simplified the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale and renamed it the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale. This change involved stripping away the scale's former central pressure, flooding and storm surge estimates. These factors among others are now forecast separately. In 2009 the National Weather Service began using new probability models that provide storm surge estimates ranging from 0.6 to 7.6 meters (two to 25 feet).
What the future holds
History keeps us guessing about where and when the next big tropical cyclone will hit on the U.S. Atlantic or Gulf coasts. As for the most powerful hurricane ever, experts are divided. Some say 1998's Gilbert.; an official answer from a NOAA Web site lists three: 1969's Camille, 1980's Allen and 2005's Wilma (the World Meteorological Organization agrees with the latter).
William Gray, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and the "grandfather" of annual hurricane season forecasting, picked the category 4 Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. NHC Director Read went with an unnamed Caribbean hurricane from 1780.
The Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30 annually, is predicted to produce more and stronger storms than average this year, although active years have been the norm since 1995. That year the Atlantic entered a period of warm sea-surface temperatures of what is called the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation, and such cycles typically last two to three decades.
"If the future is like the past, we should have another 10 to 15 years of this active period," Gray says.
This oscillation means the Atlantic is expected to cool in the future, obscuring links among hurricane activity and global warming. Perhaps counterintuitively, recent computer modeling studies predict fewer tropical cyclones if the ocean heats up further as a result of global warming. But they also predict intensification of the ones that do form, albeit with limited confidence. Frequency drops by 6 to 34 percent this century, according to 2010 review article in Nature Geoscience, whereas intensity rises 2 to 11 percent. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Today, water is a bigger concern than the wind when it comes to property destruction and loss of life. Look for more emphasis on storm surges in future forecasts, because it is the main reason why evacuations become necessary. Many planners suggest following Read's prescription: "In the U.S. 'Run from the water, hide from the wind' is pretty good, simple advice."
As for the addition of a new category 6, Read insists it is not needed. "I'd be totally opposed to that, even if they did get stronger," he says. "I'll fight 'em tooth and nail under my regime. We'll keep what we have now, but I'm going to focus more on the impacts."
From ScientificAmerican.com
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