For the handful of hurricane geeks out there

Posted byRandall 142 Comments on For the handful of hurricane geeks out there

Selections from lost NHC discussion bulletins:



HURRICANE HUMBERTO DISCUSSION NUMBER 5
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
500 AM EDT THU SEP 13 2007

THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER HAS DETERMINED...BASED ON RECON
AND MODEL GUIDANCE...THAT "HUMBERTO" IS A RIDICULOUS NAME FOR
A HURRICANE. THIS WILL BE THE LAST ADVISORY ISSUED CONCERNING
THIS STORM...UNTIL A MORE SERIOUS NAME IS CHOSEN.

$$ FORECASTER BLYTHE


HURRICANE FABIAN DISCUSSION NUMBER 15
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
5 AM EDT SUN AUG 31 2003

FORECASTER AVILA CONTINUES TO INSIST...DESPITE ALL RECON
EVIDENCE...THAT IT WAS NOT HE WHO TOOK MY SANDWICH FROM THE
NHC FRIDGE. THIS ASSERTION IS NOT SUPPORTED BY FORECASTER
STEWART OR MY STATISTICAL MODELS...AND BASED ON THE TIGHT
CLUSTERING OF GUIDANCE...I AM ISSUING A WARNING FOR FORECASTER
AVILA...THAT HE HAD BETTER BRING HIS OWN LUNCH TOMORROW. THIS
WILL BE THE LAST WARNING ISSUED FOR FORECASTER AVILA.

$$ FORECASTER JACOBS


HURRICANE JEANNE DISCUSSION NUMBER 5
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MIAMI FL
5 PM EDT TUE SEP 22 1998

THIS IS JUST TO SAY...THAT THE STORM IN THE ATLANTIC...WHICH
WE NAMED JEANNE...IS STRENGTHENING. IT HAS A DISTINCT EYE...
LIKE A WOMAN...AND GOOD PRESENTATION ON RADAR. THIS IS ALSO
TO SAY...THAT ADVISORIES MAY BE ISSUED FOR BERMUDA...WHERE A
DRYING FISH...RESTS ON A BEACH...BESIDE THE COCONUT PALMS.

$$ FORECASTER CARLOS WILLIAMS


TROPICAL DEPRESSION IVAN DISCUSSION NUMBER 59
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
11 PM EDT THU SEP 16 2004

THE LOW LEVEL CENTER OF CIRCULATION OF TROPICAL DEPRESSION
IVAN COULD NOT BE LOCATED BY RECON...AND THE PRESENTATION IS
POOR TO ABSENT ON SATELLITE IMAGERY. IT SEEMS SAFE TO ASSUME
THAT...BARRING RENEWED CONVECTION ...THE CYCLONE HAS DISSAP--
...OH GOD...HE IS HERE...IVAN IS HERE IN THE OFFICE...EVERYONE
GET DOWN OH GOD HE IS INTENSIFYLKSDJFLKHHALKJKL...

$$ FORECASTER PRESCOTT


HURRICANE LILI DISCUSSION NUMBER 49
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MIAMI FL
11 AM EDT THU OCT 03 2002

HEY GUYS...I WAS JUST WONDERING...IF YOU EVER THINK ABOUT
THINGS. LIKE...YOU KNOW...WHETHER IT IS ALL WORTH IT.

$$ FORECASTER FREDERICK


TROPICAL STORM KATRINA DISCUSSION NUMBER 30
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
5 AM EDT TUE AUG 30 2005

THE WMO HAS DETERMINED THAT...DUE TO THE EXTREME DESTRUCTION
CAUSED BY THIS HURRICANE...THE NAME "NEW ORLEANS" WILL BE
REMOVED FROM THE LIST OF CITY NAMES...AND NOT USED FOR ANY
FUTURE AMERICAN CITY.

$$ FORECASTER SCHOEN


HURRICANE ISIDORE DISCUSSION NUMBER 24
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MIAMI FL
11 PM EDT SAT SEP 21 2002

HURRICANE ISIDORE CONTINUES TO STRENGTHEN...AND MOVE TOWARD
THE BAY OF CAMPECHE. HOWEVER...THE NHC WOULD LIKE TO REMIND
EVERYONE IN THE AFFECTED AREA THAT THE REAL STORM...IS INSIDE
US ALL.

$$ FORECASTER ANDERSON

142 replies on “For the handful of hurricane geeks out there”

  1. I do recommend reading the actual 2005 NHC discussion bulletins on Hurricane Epsilon, the Storm That Would Not Die. As December stretched on, far beyond the end of hurricane season, it just kept defying all predictions by refusing to dissipate. The usually-curt-and-businesslike forecasters at the NHC, forced to stay in the office and issue bulletins every six hours about a hurricane whose continued existence made no sense, started to come a little unglued by the end:

    http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/EPSILON.shtml?

    (Read the links in the “Discussion” column.)

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  2. Finally, a place where I can ask this question: why are there ellipses all over NWS advisories?

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  3. This is one of the most entertaining things I have read in awhile. Especially the actual bulletins.

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  4. IS THERE ACTUALLY A GOOD REASON FOR THEM TO STILL COMMUNICATE IN PERMACAPS?

    I thought it was pretty well established that that is very difficult to read

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  8. A note on Katrina and New Orleans.

    Katrina didn’t do anything much to New Orleans, as the eye passed a number of miles to the east at the mouth of the Pearl River (I almost wrote “Perl” there — yes, I’m a geek).

    Due to topography, the clocked winds in the city were on the order of Category 2, not the Category 3 that devastated the cities of Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi.

    According to at least one expert, what should have occurred in New Orleans was “wet ankles.”

    The reason why New Orleans flooded was not a hurricane but, among other things, the astoundingly incompetent performance by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in building levees and flood walls. This was, again according to an expert forensic engineer, a human-made disaster on the order of Chernobyl.

    This is a fact documented in two major engineering reports, one sponsored by the state of Louisiana and the other by the National Science Foundation, as well as several more generally accessible books, among which is Ivor Van Heerden’s The Storm, which I recommend.

    Actor/writer/comedian Harry Shearer, whom you may know from The Simpsons as C Montgomery Burns et al and the bass player in This is Spinal Tap has produced a serious documentary on the subject, The Big Uneasy, which lays out the facts of the causes of the city’s near-destruction. I urge everyone with any curiosity about the subject to either seek it out in one of its remaining theatrical engagements or to see it on video or pay per view.

    (Disclosure: Mr Shearer is a rather loose acquaintance of mine, mostly through a number of years of email correspondence. We’ve only actually met a couple of times. I have no financial stake in his film)

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  9. FORECASTER SCHOEN
    I’m not sure I would go within 10 meters of any weather chart with this name. It seems too much like courting disaster…

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  10. Fists and John: The all-caps format and the ellipses (which seem to serve the syntactical role of commas) are an artifact of the extremely limited character set agreed upon so that these messages could be transmitted via all kinds of international organizations.

    There was a request for comments last year on a proposal to finally make the alerts mixed-case and expand the character set, and I don’t know why it didn’t happen.

    Steve: You are largely correct; this was an engineering failure of spectacular proportions. The levees were well within their engineering specs when they failed, so to the extent we can assign blame, it goes to a whole slew of humans, starting with the ACoE designers to the people who actually drove the pylons to the structure of the coastal flood insurance system. But the hurricane sure helped 🙂 But yeah, this is definitely mainstream scientific and engineering thought. There’s a ton of material out there, both from before and after the hurricane, which supports your general argument. On the other hand, the fact remains that a hurricane striking a little to the west, a highly probable event over not too much time, could have caused what Katrina did even if the ACoE built everything to spec, so it still suggests there’s blame yet to assign. Hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel talks a lot about the role of the public/private flood insurance system in this problem.

    In the summer of 2005, I briefly worked next door to a project which used some new modeling tools to assess the specifics of the danger to New Orleans from a major hurricane. Last I heard, the project was disbanded not long after I left. Never did ask why …

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  11. TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM
    TROPICAL STORM FRANKLIN DISCUSSION NUMBER 8
    NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
    5 AM EDT SAT JUL 23 2005

    FRANKLIN…THE STORM…NOT THE FORECASTER…HAS BECOME A LITTLE
    BETTER ORGANIZED OVERNIGHT. REPORTS FROM THE AIR FORCE RESERVE HURRICANE HUNTER AIRCRAFT A FEW HOURS AGO INDICATE THAT THE WIND FIELD HAS BECOME MORE SYMMETRIC WHILE THE PRESSURE CONTINUED A SLOW BUT STEADY FALL…TO 1001 MB AT 05Z. THE PEAK 850 MB FLIGHT LEVEL WINDS WERE 57 KT IN THE NORTHEAST QUADRANT…WHICH SUPPORTS A SOLID 45 KT AS THE SURFACE ESTIMATE.

    THE CENTER OF CIRCULATION IS WELL EMBEDDED IN A SMALL CIRCULAR AREA OF DEEP CONVECTION…AND EARLIER RECONNAISSANCE DATA SUGGESTED THAT THE CYCLONE WAS GETTING READY TO STRENGTHEN. CONSEQUENTLY…THE
    SHORT-TERM PROSPECTS FOR INTENSIFICATION ARE GOOD. HOWEVER…THE OPPORTUNITY FOR DEVELOPMENT IN THE LONG RUN APPEARS LIMITED…WITH AN INCREASE IN SHEAR AND A DECREASE IN SSTS SEEMINGLY IN THE CYCLONE’S FUTURE. IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE THAT LITTLE OR NOTHING WILL BE LEFT OF FRANKLIN…THE STORM…NOT THE FORECASTER…IN 2-3 DAYS.

    FORECASTER FRANKLIN

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  12. Don’t forget the jokes made by and at the expense of Forecaster Franklin during TS Franklin in 2005.

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  14. xkcd:

    The hurricane “helped” only in the sense that it generated the storm surge with pushed the inadequately designed levees and, especially, flood walls beyond their limits.

    The Corps simply did a horrible job, from start to finish. After Hurricane Betsy in the 1960s, the Corps was told by Congress to develop a comprehensive plan to protect New Orleans and they came up with a demonstrably inadequate specification, something called the “Standard Project Hurricane,” which was arrived at by taking all the hurricanes in recent history, throwing out the strongest ones as being improbable (although logic might tell you that if they’d already occurred, they were far from improbable) and then concocting a design that wasn’t even capable of defending against that. After 40 or more years, it should be noted, the project, as bad as it was, had not been complete.

    One last item of note: as The Big Uneasy points out, one of the contractors took issue with the Corps’s design for the flood walls, asserting that the sheet pilings were specified to be driven to an insufficient depth. The contractor went to court over the issue but lost and was forced to full the contract as “designed.” The wall was one of those which collapsed.

    Regarding your comment about “a hurricane striking a little to the west,” which I’ve argued about with Harry Shearer via email for a number of years, bear in mind that in order to do that, it would have to cross a number of miles of wetlands, which would greatly diminish the force of the storm. There’s a rule of thumb, which I cannot quote at the moment other than as a generality, which says that for every acre of wetland a hurricane crosses, its force is diminished by a significant fraction. Since hurricanes along the Gulf come from the south, in general, the force of a storm would blunted considerably by the time it reached the city.

    The Hurricane Pam “table top” exercise probably posits the worst case for New Orleans in terms of a storm’s effect. It supposes a relatively weak storm stalling as it comes ashore and squatting for some time on top of the city. There the damage would indeed come from flooding the many bowl-like depressions which make of the city’s topography.

    There it would be the responsibility of the city’s drainage and pumping system to mitigate the damage. Sadly, the Corps again would most likely fail the city. As part of the new “protection” system, the Corps has built a gigantic system based around pumps which, according to whistleblower Maria Garzino (featured in Shearer’s film), simply fail to meet specification and would very likely break down under the stress of pumping out from a storm. Her findings have been independently confirmed by an analysis by a firm which has no dealings with the Corps, stating that if anything, Ms Garzino is being too lenient in her findings.

    It’s a bitter irony that when the Dutch wanted to learn how to build pumps in the 1960s after their flooding disaster, they came to New Orleans to learn about what was then the envy of the world: the Wood Pump (designed by a Mr A. Baldwin Wood in the early 20th century, not made from wood).

    I should also note that I don’t live in New Orleans, only drove through the periphery of the city once back in the 1970s, and don’t particularly care if I ever visit there or not. I have personal stake other than as an interested observer and someone who desires some of the myths about New Orleans to be busted and the true story of this human-made tragedy to be told.

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  16. Holy crap! I love it! I’ve seen a few odd things in the CA weather discussions, but never anything like that. I also once emailed NWS to scold them about calling rain ‘bad’ weather during a drought… meaning I am a huge nerd.

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  18. Steve,

    I will certainly look for The Big Uneasy.

    Do you, or does anyone else for that matter, know if there is any truth to the assertion (here in The Netherlands) that New Orleans’ levees were built to withstand a 1 in 100 event (as opposed to 1 in 10,000 for the Deltaworks built here following the 1953 disaster)?

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  19. Randal, more fine work. I’m pleased to announce that this and today’s comic will be proudly displayed in the Texas A&M Weather Center, along with your other excellent weather-related comics. 😀

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  21. This is great. I actually remember the Epsilon coverage. Avila is especially hilarious. He often slips in little asides. I missed the Franklin coverage, though – thanks, guys for posting that!

    (And I can’t let a Katrina/NO discussion pass without a gentle reminder that K did as much or worse damage on the east side (LA, MS, AL) without near the press coverage.)

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  22. The ellipses and permacaps are hold-overs from the days of teletype. There’s still some technology out there that can only read the advisories in that form.

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  23. FORECASTER FRANKLIN certainly seems to have a sense of humor:

    ZCZC MIATCDAT4 ALL
    TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM
    TROPICAL STORM HUMBERTO DISCUSSION NUMBER 6
    NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL092007
    1100 AM EDT THU SEP 13 2007

    […]

    BASED ON OPERATIONAL ESTIMATES…HUMBERTO STRENGTHENED FROM A 30 KT
    DEPRESSION AT 15Z YESTERDAY TO A 75 KT HURRICANE AT 09Z THIS
    MORNING…AN INCREASE OF 45 KT IN 18 HOURS. TO PUT THIS
    DEVELOPMENT IN PERSPECTIVE…NO TROPICAL CYCLONE IN THE HISTORICAL
    RECORD HAS EVER REACHED THIS INTENSITY AT A FASTER RATE NEAR
    LANDFALL. IT WOULD BE NICE TO KNOW…SOMEDAY…WHY THIS HAPPENED.

    […]

    $$
    FORECASTER FRANKLIN

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  26. Probably my favourite one was when Hurricane Vince formed near the Iberian Peninsula in October 2005.

    “IF IT LOOKS LIKE A HURRICANE… IT PROBABLY IS… DESPITE ITS ENVIRONMENT AND UNUSUAL LOCATION.”

    Also good was the very final advisory on Zeta, issued on January 6, 2006:
    “ZETA NO LONGER MEETS THE CRITERIA OF A TROPICAL CYCLONE… WHICH MEANS THAT BOTH IT AND THE 2005 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON HAVE ENDED.

    UNLESS ZETA SOMEHOW MAKES AN UNLIKELY MIRACLE COMEBACK… THIS IS THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER SIGNING OFF FOR 2005… FINALLY.”

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  27. yes yes

    ALTHOUGH THE ATMOSPHERE SEEMS TO WANT TO DEVELOP TROPICAL STORMS AD NAUSEAM…THE CALENDAR WILL SHORTLY PUT AN END TO THE USE OF THE GREEK ALPHABET TO NAME THEM.”

    amk

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  28. @SubtleKnife

    Do you, or does anyone else for that matter, know if there is any truth to the assertion (here in The Netherlands) that New Orleans’ levees were built to withstand a 1 in 100 event (as opposed to 1 in 10,000 for the Deltaworks built here following the 1953 disaster)?

    That’s more or less correct, though there are those who suggest that the New Orleans “protection” system does not even meet the 1/100 event criterion. As I mentioned, the Corp’s “Standard Project Hurricane” discards as outliers a number of strong storms which have definitely occurred.

    The irony, as I pointed out earlier, is that the Dutch came to New Orleans as they were designing Deltaworks to study how to build efficient pumps.

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  30. Oh my holy Bernoulli.

    I thought I was the only person in the universe who read the NWS/NOAA dispatches during bad weather as a literary genre.

    This was like getting a Valentine from a dozen people I never met. Thanks.

    The Seattle/Sand Point NWS team sometimes comes up with good ones, but usually when our weather is being normally boring and predictable. When the crazy-ass Pacific cyclones or super-dry forest fire fronts come in, they’re usually banging their heads into walls just trying to get people out of the usual assumption that the weather will continue being boring and predictable.

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  31. Strip #944 reminds me of the time I made a comic expressing curiosity about what would happen when Dollhouse introduced more than 26 characters. Sadly, I had such a buffer of strips that Dollhouse got cancelled by the time the comic posted. Without ever resolving my question.

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  32. The Australian BOM could really learn a few things from these guys. I’m going to find out why we done get cyclone reports like this!

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  34. Can anyone run these through the speech synthesizer used for the weather radio? It would be most excellent.

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  35. … this is incredible, given that yes, I am/was one of those hurricane geeks, diligently following storms when I once lived in Florida, and seeing this all-caps discussion format appear suddenly here kind of warms my nostalgia channels immensely. <333

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  36. Heh, you wrote some of these a year or so ago right? Glad you kept them and posted. Funny stuff. 🙂

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  38. I hope you are doing well. I don’t know you, but you have been on my mind. I try and send an extra prayer out into the sky when I can remember to. Whether or not you hold a belief that that will do any good in the grand scheme of things, I hope the fact that someone cares is warming your heart today, even if it is just a random stranger on the internet. That is all. /sappiness

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  40. I know it’s unrelated, but today’s “Family Decals” panel would be great as a real sticker. You ARE planning to offer it with your other swag, yes? Or, have you already done so? I’d like one, is the point. Thanks!

    Happy Day!

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  41. Katia public advisory number 23:

    …KATIA SPARRING WITH STRONG UPPER-LEVEL WINDS…KNOCKED DOWN TO A TROPICAL STORM FOR THE SECOND TIME…

    Man, the NHC hurricane specialists need to get second jobs as authors.

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  44. I confess that I am a NWS-a-holic and I found every last one of these outrageously entertaining! Good to know that there are at least a handful of weather geeks out there like me!

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  45. I’ve been following the discussions for years now. I’ve always appreciated Avilas’ sense of humor. I’ll have to look more closely at Brown now.

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  46. Calculator, it looks right to me, unless you are squabbling against the rounding up of a penny. Remember, it’s COMPOUND interest. Or, I guess that wasn’t stated in the comic but that’s how everyone does it.

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  47. oh wait… yes it was stated. i lied. Also my captcha is ‘tsissia emo’ ! WTF?

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  48. I used to work for the NWS.

    Believe me when I say that those guys are just a little bit nutty in their own way.
    But it’s a good way.

    XKCD is EXACTLY the sort of humor most of them read. (Though, way back when I was one of them, the comic of choice was “The Far Side”.)

    Given that any humor that they wish to express must escape past humorless government beauracrat bosses, it is not surprising how dry and sometimes subtle it must be.

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  49. Thanks for this! I too remember following Epsilon and Zeta at the end of the 2005 season, and wondered when the season would finally end.
    Here’s another line from http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.021.shtml?, penned by Avila:

    HOWEVER…THE UPPER LEVEL WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO BE
    HIGHLY UNFAVORABLE AND EPSILON WILL LIKELY BECOME A REMNANT LOW. I HEARD THAT BEFORE ABOUT EPSILON…HAVEN’T YOU?

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  50. Re: the 100-year levee question. Pre-Katrina, the storms were designed to withstand a corps “project hurricane,” which was a combination of wind speed, central pressure and, I think, distance of max winds, and the three numbers had no relationship to any type of real storm. Helping guide construction, however, were historically-based reports on what a project hurricane should be, one in 1959 and one in 1978(again, working on memory here). Most of the pre-K system’s design was begun before 1965 Betsy and was to the ’59 report’s history of storms, which basically meant the design was to assure surge experienced in 1915 and 1947 storms could be handled. Construction actually started after Betsy on much of the system, and some update was made for the major flooding that occurred then, with the design memos for segments saying they were designed for 200 or 300 year return periods. Updated again a bit, but not much, for 1969 Camille. One major failure was decision not to adjust newer levee heights for known subsidence that caused 1929 ngvd datum to be out of date by the mid-80s and into the ’90s, meaning some segments were as much as 2 feet below what should have been the design heights.
    More importantly, however, the system was largely based on PAST storms and not on what COULD happen. A Katrina-like surge was finally recognized in the late ’90s and the New Orleans District actually did a reconnaissance study on upgrading the levees to handle “Category 5” surge. But then 9/11 occurred and Bush administration zeroed budget for follow-design work, new-project status.
    Post-K, corps-sponsored international engineering team threw out past standards and created new standard based on future-looking risk modeling of potential storms in Gulf, including some adjustment over the years for climate change sea level rise. Result is that on eastern side of city, where levees were supposed to be 17 1/2 feet high before Katrina, but were actually only 15 1/2 feet, the newly completed combination of earthen levees and floodwalls are an average 32 feet high for surge from a so called 100 year storm, a storm with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year, and close to the surge heights of 2008’s Gustav .
    Corps also was told by Congress post-K to come up with recommendations for protecting south Louisiana from “the equivalent of a Category 5” storm, basically a 500-1000 year event. Initial report suggests some levees on eastern side would have to be 45 feet high, and that major coastal restoration efforts would also have to be undertaken to reduce surge heights. About $15 billion was appropriated in aftermath of Katrina for the new “100-year” levee system, for interior drainage and other measures. About $10 b actually has been spent on the levee system around the New Orleans area. Another $4 billion is either in hand or really, really expected to be received by federal and state agencies for restoration over next 4-6 years. More money is likely to be put in coastal restoration efforts — rebuilding wetlands and barrier islands — from fines and damage assessment payments from BP oil spills. The cost of the Cat-5 system, including coastal restoration, would be in the guestimate range of $85 to $130 billion and would take 30 years to complete.
    A 10,000 year event in holland does not produce anywhere near the same level of water as a 500-year hurricane storm surge on Louisiana shoreline, I’m told.

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