North and South

August 26, 2020 6:39 AM

Major hurricane Laura is bearing down on the Gulf Coast with possible rapid intensification. Meanwhile, off the coast of Asia, Typhoon Bavi is soon to make landfall in North Korea.

Historically, North Korea has had one hurricane make landfall, Lingling in 2019.

Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, formerly of Weather Underground, are now contributors to Yale Climate Connections' Eye on the Storm.

posted by dances_with_sneetches (51 comments total)

Water temperature at Houston is 86 degrees.

This is going to be a fucking disaster.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:08 AM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

Serious question - I feel like we are in constant catastrophe mode. Is it real or perception?
posted by double bubble at 7:24 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Marco was a gentleman, and bowed out gracefully.
posted by Melismata at 7:25 AM on August 26, 2020 [6 favorites]

Holy cow!

In the extended range, there is some chance that Laura re-intensifies as a tropical cyclone off the Mid-Atlantic coast, instead of becoming part of a frontal system, but for now the forecast will stay extratropical at 96 hours and beyond.

This storm could make landfall in the gulf, degrade to a tropical depression over Arkansas, then sweep out over Maryland and re-intensify into a tropical storm once it gets back over water.

Is there any precedent for this? Would the NHC still use the same name, or would it be considered a new tropical system?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:48 AM on August 26, 2020

Serious question - I feel like we are in constant catastrophe mode. Is it real or perception?

Both. Humans are really bad at intuitively measuring risk, long term risk more so. Observer bias is a real thing.

However it is real at least in terms of hurricanes. They're just heat engines. Water evaporates, latent heat gets released, air gets hotter, can absorbs more water, more latent heat gets released. As the air gets hotter it gets lighter, air rushes in to equalize pressure and boom, a hurricane. Thanks to climate change the oceans are warmer than ever giving them even more energy to feed off.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:49 AM on August 26, 2020 [17 favorites]

We're in real catastrophe mode, but both the catastrophes and our perceptions of them are exacerbated by the fact that we don't have leadership competent enough to deal with immediate crises (hurricanes, wildfire, superstorms, economic collapse, threat of war, etc) so feel compelled to keep a closer eye on these problems than we might otherwise. (And there's climate change and an ongoing epidemic making all the regular crises worse.)

I don't even live in hurricane country anymore, but I feel such a pit of dread over this. If an atheist's prayers help at all -- I'm absolutely praying for the Gulf.
posted by grandiloquiet at 7:50 AM on August 26, 2020 [20 favorites]

Kyle otoh was allll wet over North Carolina but transitioned into a beefier Storm Ellen on its way across the pond to give [parts of] Ireland a drubbing. On constant catastrophe: Kyle is the earliest K storm ever, ten days in advance of Katrina 2005. That's one datum rather than data to indicate more frequent storms.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:50 AM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Hurricane Ivan in 2004 came around twice.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:53 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Laura has swerved, now looks like it will hit between Houston and Louisiana, closer to Beaumont.
posted by emjaybee at 7:54 AM on August 26, 2020

Ah, Houston, where they got 60" of rain during Harvey in 2017.
posted by Melismata at 7:57 AM on August 26, 2020

It looks like Storm Ellen was extratropical. But from Huffy Puffy's link it it looks like Ivan set the precedent for retaining names for cyclones which redevelop from remnants.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:59 AM on August 26, 2020

Atlantic Hurricane Season prediction models are getting pretty good and this one has turned out as expected, that is, extremely active. (btw, that research is in part by Michael E. Mann of climate hockey stick fame)

While an increased frequency of hurricanes has not been confirmed to have a relation to climate change, as mentioned above, the intensity of individual hurricanes definitely does, due both to warming oceans (storm intensity) and sea level rise (storm surge intensity)
posted by gwint at 8:01 AM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

@EricHolthaus:

NHC just boosted the storm surge forecast to historic levels in Louisiana.

20ft of surge would put Hurricane Laura into rare territory in the 140-year recorded history of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, on par with Ike (2008) and Galveston (1900).

This is a dire emergency.

Holthaus is a meteorologist and climate activist and tends to focus on the more extreme ends of the prediction models, but still, the storm surge is going to be massive.
posted by gwint at 8:13 AM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

Would the NHC still use the same name
Huh. It's the same system, just will have gone back to being a depression for a while, so it will have the same name. I think.

Ah, Houston, where they got 60" of rain during Harvey in 2017.
I think the expectation is that Laura will move faster over the Houston area and not stall out.

And - 15-20 ft storm surge? That is catastrophic. People have to get out now.
posted by carter at 8:49 AM on August 26, 2020

... and see https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ for current maps.
posted by carter at 8:52 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

I live in Houston.

If you want great coverage of gulf storm systems, SpaceCityWeather.com is your guy. He's a local guy with a national profile now, which has been cool to watch happen.

Houston is pretty much out of any serious danger per the current projections. It'll be border-areas between LA and TX that get hammered, rendering this into an uncomfortably accurate re-run of Hurricane Rita 15 years ago.

Harvey was pretty bad for lots of people here, but it was "only" a rain event so the threat model was different (and super super predictable, really).

This is a full-on storm, with wind AND rain. Houston last had a hurricane in 2008, with Ike.

Even so, there's more freakout than is warranted. With a conventional hurricane (vs. the sort of unprecedented immobile storm that Harvey was), you flee the storm surge if you're in danger of it, and hunker down otherwise up to Cat 3 or maybe 4.

If you're not in danger of the surge (or, for a stronger storm, within say 30 miles of the coast), you stay the fuck home unless you have some medical situation where protracted loss of power would be a problem.

You do this so that the people who DO need to evac CAN. There are not infinite roads nor is there infinite gas, and 7 million people live here. Even so, every time, we hear about people in far west or north suburbs freaking out and driving to Dallas.

All that said: east Texas and west Louisiana are in for it. My sibling is hosting evacuees they know in Jackson, MS, already. And if we're being honest, I feel super guilty, because I'm pretty sure I caused the storm to turn east.

I say this because, after 26 years in Houston, I finally bought a generator yesterday when I heard a Lowe's nearby got a shipment in. It's actually still in my car, because it's too big for my wife to help me unload it. At this point, I'm giving serious thought to leaving it there and taking it back on Friday.
posted by uberchet at 8:59 AM on August 26, 2020 [23 favorites]

Oh, and in re: the scale of Harvey: Harvey gave us in like 4 days the equivalent of a year's rainfall here.

This is a blog post I wrote at the time, using Google Maps and a famous Harvey photo to explain just exactly how much water that meant.
posted by uberchet at 9:01 AM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

After a number of floods caused by tropical storms and hurricanes, I've come to dread rain here in Houston. It's been a while since I had to deal with the wind aspect of hurricanes, though. Fortunately, it seems like we'll be spared the worst of it.

My folks, however, live in deep East Texas, and the centerline of the predicted path passes within a few miles of their place. They evacuated to points west yesterday, thankfully, but I worry that they won't have much of a home to return to.
posted by heteronym at 9:45 AM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Seconding the endorsement of Eric Berger and Matt Lanza at Space City Weather.

Every hurricane has the potential to be extremely dangerous, and Laura is no exception. At the same time, there's a completely unhelpful tendency for morbid curiosity to focus on the most extreme projections. The extreme projections should absolutely be accounted for in preparations, but it's irresponsible to report them as certainties in an attempt to shake people out of complacency. Because there will always be another hurricane season, and you don't want people inured to your warnings.

But the emergent qualities of the media cycle, especially today, don't just include the extreme scenarios; they amplify them, and the most extreme and therefore surprising projections are the ones people are most eager to share outside of their most relevant context, where they are even more likely to be misinterpreted and distorted, and so on and so forth. Making it even harder to calibrate the appropriate reactions to the news.

All of which is to stress the importance of independent, curious, local news reporting with local focus and expertise.
posted by pykrete jungle at 9:52 AM on August 26, 2020 [6 favorites]

And also, it'd be generally good news if Laura doesn't hit Houston, given just how many people there are there, but there's lots of people points east, of often less infrastructure and resources available to support them.

Luckily for everyone, secret hopes that the storm goes elsewhere don't actually affect the path of the storm. But if they do, hope that it loses strength and coherence and dissipates.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:01 AM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Small point, but North Korea has had quite a few typhoons, well before 2019.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:01 AM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have a rule of thumb: if there are no stops (sheer, dry air, cold waters, Sahara sand) hurricanes will intensify beyond what the models predict. I've seen it happen time and again.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:16 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

This live webcam from sunrise beach near Houston is showing some pretty intense surf. Good luck everyone.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 10:19 AM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

My parents and sister (named Laura!) and her family live in the Houston area, so I keep an eye on all Gulf Coast systems. They did flee Rita and got stuck in that 10-hr traffic jam to Dallas with four adults, two kids, and a puking cat in the car and are much more careful about evacuation decisions now. To be fair to them, we are transplanted northern folk, used to blizzards not hurricanes, and they had never previously experienced what was supposed to be a direct hit or had to make that "stay or go" decision.

Although from a personal perspective I am glad that this Laura will miss my Laura and the rest of my family down there, I am so, so worried about the toll on the communities that will be worst hit. Communities with median incomes of $29,000 who will not have the resources to rebuild, and may not even have the resources to flee with their lives. And of course who has any confidence our federal government in current form is at all capable of offering the support they will need.

My understanding (also nth-ing the spacecityweather rec) is that thanks to the speed of this storm, it is the storm surge more so than the rainfall totals that will be the particular flavor of destruction and devastation this time around. It's not Harvey, which sat and sat and sat and just dumped rain - for Harvey my parents were ordered to evacuate after landfall and despite not being anywhere near the coast, because the levee for the river near them was predicted to overtop. (Thankfully it didn't.)
posted by misskaz at 10:58 AM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

The hurricane in my family memory was Hurricane Audrey which made landfall very close to Laura's predicted track. A 12-foot storm surge killed several hundred people, and caused damage as far as 25 miles inland. It was quite grim, I only heard the stories second-hand.
posted by gimonca at 11:32 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

My parents who live in Beaumont are on their way to Dallas to stay with an uncle. My sister and her family are staying in Lumberton, which is near Beaumont and not on storm surge maps. She shared this post on facebook with a huge list of weather webcams.

I live far away in Chicago so can't really do anything to help. I wish they'd move more inland.
posted by bleary at 12:59 PM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

Laura is now a cat 4 with 140mph winds and gusts of 160mph. This is major winds.
posted by mightshould at 1:27 PM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Something to note is that Laura is moving quickly enough that it is likely to cause widespread power outages all the way up into southern (and possibly central) Arkansas thanks to the combination of flooding rains and tropical storm force winds.

To put that in context, that's equivalent to the worst damage Miami has seen from tropical weather since I moved here 6 years ago. In Arkansas. Probably coming along with much worse flooding in creeks and mountain valleys. I also wouldn't be surprised to see a major river flooding event in eastern Arkansas a week or two from now as all the water works its way downstream.

The surge is coming either way, but I'm hoping that an eyewall replacement cycle kicks off tonight before landfall so that the winds near the landfall point aren't quite as bad as forecast.
posted by wierdo at 2:36 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Levi Cowan has posted an update.
posted by carter at 3:14 PM on August 26, 2020

Communities with median incomes of $29,000 who will not have the resources to rebuild, and may not even have the resources to flee with their lives. And of course who has any confidence our federal government in current form is at all capable of offering the support they will need.

We, as a nation, are at the epicenter of a storm consisting of extreme wealth inequality and right-wing white supremacist governments' failures to address poverty, racism, climate change and a pandemic.

The predictions I hear for lower income areas like Lake Charles are catastrophic. Massive amounts of people are moving while a lethal virus also is raging. A news report raised the question of whether the number of volunteers who normally show up will be reduced due to covid.

If anyone can recommend the best places to donate (Red Cross?), please share.
posted by NorthernLite at 3:15 PM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

The National Hurricane center is using the word "unsurvivable."

"Unsurvivable storm surge with large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana, including Calcasieu and Sabine Lakes. This surge could penetrate up to 40 miles inland from the immediate coastline, and flood waters will not fully recede for several days after the storm."

This may make landfall in Louisiana as a Category 5. Only five category 5 story have made landfall in the US. Where it is projected to make landfall is very flat territory not much above sea levels for miles and miles inland.

Oh, and not a thing's wikipedia link to typhoons in North Korea lists a number of ex-typhoons. (I didn't see a typhoon strength storm making landfall, but I didn't try to go through all of them. I got the "second typhoon to make landfall in North Korea" from a Jeff Masters post.)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:30 PM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

I volunteered a lot at the a Red Cross when I was young, but since then I've read one too many terrible stories about how the American Red Cross spends their money. I'm not local, so other people might know better, local charities -- but for national stuff I prefer Direct Relief to the American Red Cross. Their focus is on medical aid, and it's absolutely a laser focus. You can specify that you want your donation to go to people dealing with Hurricane Laura. Habitat for Humanity does some disaster recovery work. And I've never donated, but World Kitchen seems to be doing a good job of feeding people/paying chefs, both pretty necessary things right now.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:46 PM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Ah, that makes sense; I failed to parse that as being specifically about typhoon strength at landfall.

(I lack the meteorological acumen to actually verify the claim, but it seems plausible now that I understand it; ordinarily typhoons would lose a lot of wind strength going up the peninsula so that most of their damage in the north (and the North) comes in the form of torrential floods.)
posted by Not A Thing at 8:59 PM on August 26, 2020

Unsurvivable.

Let that sink in.
posted by double bubble at 9:00 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is where the US has planned to build several BLEVE prone LNG export facilities, to sell franked gas to Ukraine and France, and Japan.

We keep begging them not to. Energy Dominance and everything. They don't have to do full environmental review, because they are automatically considered 'in the national interest' by being an oil and gas facility.
posted by eustatic at 9:16 PM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

The Weather Channel is reporting the Mississippi River is flowing backward. Laura isn't onshore yet.
posted by bryon at 9:16 PM on August 26, 2020

3 years to the day since Harvey. We've had a rough week watching this one here in Houston - and that's nothing compared to what will hit Louisiana very shortly now.

The Space City guys have a short new post up about hurricanes and their impact . It's thoughtful, measured, and meaningful, which is all very on brand. I really cannot overstate how important Eric and Matt's forecasts are to the local community (well, 'local' being almost 7 million of us).

A good friend texted me tonight and said she'd be praying for me. Why, I asked, we're outside the worst of it. Oh, she said, CNN said Houston's going to get hit as bad it was during Harvey. When that's what the competition looks like, no wonder people who live in this dramatic and weather-prone city turn to the accurate and scientific instead. (It's a city full of highly educated geologists and engineers, don't forget).

That's all beside the point of Laura, about which all I can say is a very sincere and emotional 'godspeed, Louisiana.'
posted by librarylis at 9:38 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Kudos to the NWS maintenance folks in Lake Charles. The NEXRAD is still working even as it is about to get pummelled by the eyewall. The velocity data for the closest range bin is showing 108mph, which is about a mile away at only 68 feet AGL.

Rarely do the radars last this long into a storm. The northern eyewall is only about 11 miles away at this point.
posted by wierdo at 10:38 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

NOAA has put up coastal inundation dashboard that pulls together data from many buoys and other sensors.
posted by carter at 11:18 PM on August 26, 2020

Storm chaser Jeff Piotrowski is currently streaming on Periscope.
posted by carter at 11:53 PM on August 26, 2020

Hurricane Laura /r/tropicalweather live thread
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:50 AM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I saw one of these storm surge videos on Twitter last night, and it was very illustrative. Even 3 feet of storm surge is a lot - i can see why they're using terms like "unsurvivable" with a 20 ft storm surge prediction.
posted by Sparky Buttons at 5:04 AM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

At 7:00 this morning Hurricane Laura is about 20 miles north of Fort Polk in western Louisiana (about 100 miles inland), with sustained winds of 100 miles per hour, making it a category 2 hurricane. It is projected to weaken rapidly from this point, but likely still have hurricane-force winds when it goes through Shreveport this afternoon, and tropical storm force winds when it passes Little Rock, Arkansas overnight.

Most of Louisiana (excepting part of the "toe") either has or will experience tropical storm force winds (39-74 mph) today.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:27 AM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Lake Charles appears to have taken quite a pounding from what I've been able to gather from the live streams, but all in all I'm surprised that it wasn't much worse. The TV station's tower got folded in half, a few facades fell off, many of the tall buildings had some windows blown out (one much worse than the rest), and there are trees and power lines down everywhere, but from the streamers driving through residential neighborhoods, most of the homes appear to be intact enough, though I'm sure there will be a lot of work for the roofers.

I have a strong suspicion that areas closer to the coast and farther to the east that got eyewall winds directly out of the south fared much worse. The areas with the worst damage are precisely the ones where cell data won't work, after all. We don't find out about the worst damage for a while.

One chaser is just now sitting on the side of I-49 near Natchitoches waiting for what remains of the eye to pass over as I write this. So far, it looks like it's going to be mainly tree damage and power outages in areas farther north, not the severe damage seen in Lake Charles.

I remain amazed at how well cell service appears to be holding up.
posted by wierdo at 6:15 AM on August 27, 2020

I have a coworker who lives in Lake Charles. He evac'd to northern LA, and is personally fine, but his brother's house was essentially destroyed by the winds -- walls down, roof off kind of destruction. The assumption, as yet untested, is that his own house is probably not any better.

The good news is that, well, he has resources and insurance and whatnot. There's a gotcha in policies written in these areas, though, that smacked him pretty good in the past, and that's that while his homeowners' policy DOES have a displacement benefit, the flooding policy does NOT. Last time around, his damage was from flooding, so he had to pay for somewhere else to live AND pay the mortgage on his unlivable home for the duration of repairs (which, in a storm-hit area, is months and months).

The hope, this time, is that the damage was wind and not flood.

Relatives in Baton Rouge are far enough on the other side that they had a stormy night but nothing really to report other than that.
posted by uberchet at 7:02 AM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately, one of the chemical plants west of downtown Lake Charles (not any of the refineries, though) is now burning. That isn't going to help the situation.
posted by wierdo at 7:09 AM on August 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

LC without power, reports say. My thoughts are with the atakapa nation
posted by eustatic at 8:06 AM on August 27, 2020

As far as the wall of water goes it's a bit early to say but it looks like Rockefeller Refuge and the scenic Calcasieu River really sucked up that surge

this area of the country has a disproportionately high amount of Native American folks oh, so if you see any relief efforts centralizing giving to Native American tribes and people, please give to those organizations
posted by eustatic at 8:09 AM on August 27, 2020 [7 favorites]

Anyway LSU has been in a long lawsuit with FEMA over the ability of these Wetlands to soak up storm surge oh, this hurricane might prove LSU right. Southwest Louisiana opted not to build a huge wall like New Orleans has, and instead needs funding to restore the wetlands in Cameron and Vermilion Parish is. Hopefully this storm can bring attention to the need for federal funding for the Southwest Louisiana project, which has already undergone environmental review
posted by eustatic at 8:12 AM on August 27, 2020 [8 favorites]

A news report raised the question of whether the number of volunteers who normally show up will be reduced due to covid.

If it's anything like the response to the derecho here in Iowa, they'll have plenty of folks from across the country showing up, no problem.
posted by Fukiyama at 4:08 PM on August 27, 2020

The KCTV coverage of the typhoon in North Korea has been unusual:

On Wednesday, North Korea’s state TV channel Korean Central Television (KCTV) took the historically unprecedented step of broadcasting through the night as the storm Typhoon Bavi (Typhoon No. 8) approached the country. This follows a Tuesday executive policy council meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea’s Central Committee where Kim Jong Un discussed the approaching Typhoon. In response to fears that this typhoon would repeat the one that hit the country last year (Lingling)—which damaged hundreds of houses and infrastructure—the Wednesday broadcast is believed to be the first time KCTV ran programming through the night and, perhaps more remarkably, for the early hours of Thursday it showed a few hints of a public service mission and a rare degree of openness about the impending natural disaster.

posted by Not A Thing at 5:23 PM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]