Stump the Meteorologist

Oh gawd... what have we done... think of Mrs Figg... think of Mrs Figg... think of Mrs Figg... oooooh.... rose petals....

Now I keep thinking about Maggie Thatcher in a tub full of figs. Only a slight improvement, there.

Oh for Eru's sake Halfy!!!      

 

Oh bugger you've only gone and attracted the suspicious eye of Mrs Figg!

Hey! That's Orwell fault too!  

I don't see how I could be blamed for Mrs Figg's suspicious eye!

So tell us about this rain you've been getting in NY Halfy. It sounds more like Northwest Coastal weather!

nothing all that unusual. Not getting torrents, just a patch of higher frequency rain.

Actually I should correct that. My statement was for New York City.  Long Island got nailed. The motion of this patch of storm was along the coast.

Tonight I was overcome by a keen hankering to access archival weather data of storm events on the NW coast going back to the 1970's . Then I remembered this thread and got distracted ...

Anyway...
I've just figured out how to access Landsat data on a slow-as-molasses connection. Now I need some weather data to correlate it with. I'm working on a guerrilla research project that might just possibly change the future of the world {{or at least my inconspicuous little corner of it.. }} Any hints?

Most archived weather model data is in a medieval (as in torture dungeon) format known as Grib. But you can get the last 10 years in map format here: http://ready.arl.noaa.gov/READYametus.php

At least the NAM goes back 10 years. Let me check the reanalysis page. Ah, yes. The NARR data will take you back to 1979. Give it a shot and let me know if any questions.

I'm guessing since you are comparing to LandSat you are thinking about vegetation and rain. If so, don't trust model rainfall data. Don't trust satellite data. Don't trust gauge data unless it's in your own back yard and you only care about your back yard. Radar data will get you closest, but the kind folks in your area who are responsible for calibrating radar to gauge data petulantly quit the job in 2004 claiming there was too much mountain interference.

Or to put it another way, at meteorological conferences you can always pick out the folks working on rainfall: they are the ones at the end of the bar drinking their way into oblivion.

But you might give the Global Precipitation Climate Project (GPCP) a whirl. Coarse resolution but multiple instruments with quality control and calibration. Or CHIRPS.

Oops, just realized you were probably looking at coastal erosion. Wind data is at least as bad as precipitation data, but coming off the ocean you may be able to trust the model output in this case.

Yep, I'm still working on the erosion thing. There's a graph I just made and wish I could post that shows shoreline changes in one particular critical area. It shows a record loss of shoreline in 2009-10 following our record storm of Dec 2007. The storm hardly took any shoreline at the time, but it did take the near-shore sand spits and possibly a lot of other material that we usually just take for granted. I'm thinking that could be significant. As far as I know, nobody has looked at this long-time-delay correlation between winter storms and coastal erosion on our coast.

The graph also shows distinct erosion events in 1990-3 and 2001-2. For starters, I'm curious if a larger-than-average winter storm system might have made landfall on the NW Coast in the year before either of those events, and if so how they might have compared in energy to the '07 storm.

That's what I'm hoping for anyway, but I know it may take some digging. I'd appreciate any pro tips!

Classifying storm strengths takes some analysis. Assuming they are big enough to produce their own low pressure system, the pressure of the lowest closed contour provides an estimation of storm strength. Or just look at the winds.

To sift through that much data will take some coding. I assume you still have skills, if a bit rusty. I'd have to walk you through reading grib data. But you'll have a problem downloading data over your connection, so I suppose you are stuck with doing it by hand. Again, downloading images...oh, it could take a while.

Did you do the graph on computer? If so take a screen shot. If on paper, under the precarious assumption that you have a modern phone, take a picture.

Check your messages.

I don't have a phone with a camera, but I do have one with a rotary dial. Will that work?

Just for the record, the Meteorologist remains undefeated!

{{Thanks Halfy. I got it all sorted!}}

well, if not saving the world, at least saving a segment of the West Coast.

Hurricane/tropical storm Harvey is stalled over Houston since yesterday, dumping over a meter of rainfall. People tend to mix up intense rain, spatially extensive rain, and temporally extensive rain from a stalled storm. They all have the effect of increasing the total rainfall in one location, and now we have all three at once! I don't remember a hurricane stalling over land before: it's not pretty!

WATERWORLD!

An old shipmate of mine is now a Coast Guard helicopter pilot. He's down in Texas now rescuing people off roofs and out of the water. Facebook says he rescued 22 people today before being grounded by weather. That must feel good!

The big debate now is whether an evacuation should have been ordered. The mayor is being criticized for not having an evacuation plan, and in the face of it everyone agrees that no evacuation is better than a chaotic evacuation. But how do you "plan" an evacuation of millions of people?

I guess the other question I'd have is when would you actually order an evacuation of several million people, and over how big an area? ?

You were watching this in real time Halfy. It wasn't clear that Harvey was going to reach category 4 until a few hours before it made landfall, was it? An then no way to predict that it was going to stall and dump all this water?

So what if you spent 10's of millions of dollars to evacuate the whole Texas coastline, and then it turns and hits Louisiana?

To be on the safe side it seems like you'd need to have a plan to evacuate 20 million people from the coasts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in a few hours.

I don't see a winning game plan here...

These guys were amazing during Hurricane Katrina!

“The reality of the Cajun Navy is everybody out here with a boat that isn’t devastated gets out and helps others,”

That's how a community is supposed to work.
http://www.kvue.com/ext/news/nation-now/harvey-cajun-navy-heads-to-texas-to-aid-rescues/269/nationnow/2vhBzwriU46qAKC2SiOoSw

If I were within a day's drive I'd probably hitch up the boat and go give them a hand!

That says a lot that they will take their boats a couple hundred miles to help out. Hats off to them.

I wasn't following the hurricane situation enough to see if the predictions were that it would stall. You can't tell that more than a few days out. A plan to evacuate the most flood prone areas would have made sense.