WX-MAN's Musings

At a 11pm EDT had maximum sustained winds of 110 mph as a very large Category 2 hurricane. This is the best Ike has looked since making landfall in Cuba last Sunday. Here is some info on Ike’s winds from the NHC 11pm EDT discussion:

WIND DATA FROM LAND-BASED DOPPLER RADARS AND AIRCRAFT DROPSONDES INDICATE THAT WINDS NEAR CATEGORY 4 STRENGTH…115 KT OR 130 MPH… EXIST JUST A FEW HUNDRED FEET ABOVE THE SURFACE. THERE COULD BE A REPEAT OF DAMAGE TO WINDOWS IN HIGH RISE STRUCTURES SIMILAR TO WHAT OCCURRED DURING HURRICANE ALICIA IN 1983.

If you read my site you know in my last few posts the last few days Ike’s pressure resembled a stronger storm yet its winds were only a category 2. Ike is also a very large storm with winds that were very spread out. On Thursday, Dr. Jeff Masters talks about the oddity that is Ike and why this surge is so much stronger and deadlier than your average category 2. (Hat tip again to Brendan Loy)

Hurricane Ike’s winds remain at Category 2 strength, but Ike is a freak storm with extreme destructive storm surge potential. . . . Ike’s huge wind field has put an extraordinarily large volume of ocean water in motion. When this swirling column of water hits the shallow waters of the Continental Shelf, it will be be forced up into a large storm surge . . .

The amount of water Ike has put in motion is about 10% greater than what Katrina did, and thus we can expect Ike’s storm surge damage will be similar to or greater than Katrina’s. The way we can estimate this damage potential is to compute the total energy of Ike’s surface winds (kinetic energy). . . . This “Integrated Kinetic Energy” was recently proposed by Dr. Mark Powell of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division as a better measure of the destructive power of a hurricane’s storm surge than the usual Category 1-5 Saffir-Simpson scale. For example, Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi as a strong Category 3 hurricane, yet its storm surge was more characteristic of a Category 5 storm. Dr. Powell came up with a new scale to rate potential storm surge damage . . . [which] ranges from 1-6. Katrina and Wilma at their peaks both earned a 5.1 on this scale. At 12:30pm EDT [Thursday], Ike earned a 5.2 on this scale, the second highest kinetic energy of any Atlantic storm in the past 40 years.

Speaking of Brendan Loy, Pajamas Media “Weather Nerd”, he has more on what Dr. Masters wrote about.

As I’ve explained repeatedly, Ike is a freakish storm — not a “normal” Category 2 — and an extremely high storm surge, of Category 4 proportions, is widely expected by experts. Galveston’s seawall will probably be overtopped, and even if it is not, huge portions of the island will be flooded. Damage will be tremendous all throughout Galveston Bay and up the coast to Port Arthur and southwestern Louisiana. Moreover, with many thousands of people foolishly choosing to ride out the storm in vulnerable coastal areas, including Galveston Island itself, a very large death toll seems possible. I’ve titled this post “The Great Galveston Hurricane of 2008? because I fear we may be calling it that soon enough.

Landfall is expected sometime between midnight and 3am CDT Saturday. I am heading to bed now I will have more in the morning when we get a clearer picture and assessment of the damage and flooding associated with Ike. I have locked information to help track and follow Ike at the very top of my main page.

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