Yesterday was an interesting day. I presented a very straightforward map from Weather Underground showing that there were no sustained surface winds higher than 33 MPH at Irene’s US landfall.
Hundreds of people went nuts, because the map disagreed with their need to blindly trust authority. They accused me of lying (did I make the map?) They accused Weather Underground of bogus maps (Jeff Masters the denier.) They came up with every reason to not believe the Emperor was NOAAked.
Incidents like this help me to understand the roots of historical disastrous human behaviour. Many people will blindly trust authority – rather than thinking for themselves or believing what they see with their own eyes.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.
Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. Sir, we have done everything that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming on.
The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
That’s probably because before the warmism disease these institutions could be relied on for giving us the straight goods. Now it looks like this is no longer the case. Sad.
spot on…….
But Julie Banderas was on the beach looking incredible………
Seriously, it was a lynch mob mentality
people were making things up and saying Steven had said “so and so”, not a word of it true.
Not to be outdone, the next person would make up something even bigger…..
There’s a lot of people that really feed on being victims……..but then again, no fisherman ever caught a 10 inch fish either……the whole problem could have been solved by telling them they were right, it was the largest hurricane in history – evah – instead of telling them the truth, they had a squall line….
It –was- absolutely amazing. There are long standing rules to how tropical storms and hurricanes are categorized. Mr. Goddard made the connection with wind data coming from ground stations and what the media and NOAA was reporting. He simply observed that Irene’s wind speeds by the time it reached S. Carolina were well below a Cat 1 criteria. It was a tropical storm, no longer a hurricane and both politicians and the media were whipping up hysteria among the populace. Once the hurricane made landfall along the eastern seaboard Mr. Goddard called it a phony hurricane. Certainly it was a pretender.
Clearly the media did not want to hear that and neither did most of the visitors to his web site who left comments. By and large they wanted to throw out the rules. Irene’s wind speeds reported by hundreds of Weather Underground monitoring sites was almost exclusively less 40 mph and these monitoring sites even included NOAA instruments and NDBC buoy’s.
NOAA eventually acknowledged that there were sharp discrepancies (though they did not downgrade the storm to Tropical Storm status right away.) but what struck me was how badly people wanted it to be a Cat 1 hurricane and even going so far as to equate deaths to hurricane status as if being killed by a tropical storms is not as dignified as being killed by a Cat 1 or greater hurricane!
Tropical Depression – winds less than 39 mph
Tropical Storm – winds 39-73 mph (34-63 kt)
Category 1 – winds 74-95 mph (64-82 kt)
Category 2 – winds 96-110 mph (83-95 kt)
Category 3 – winds 111-130 mph (96-113 kt)
Category 4 – winds 131-155 mph (114-135 kt)
Category 5 – winds 156 mph and up (135+ kt)
NOAA, politicians, and the media have to acknowledge and follow the wind speed criteria otherwise the categories become meaningless.
Before the current state of warmism it was just not as obvious. There are indications this is a path that was started MANY, MANY years ago.
Are things getting oveblown more now or are more people realizing what they are seeing?
This World Wide Web and instant communication with others puts a whole new light on the situation but it makes it easier to promote the fear of everyday life!
The Chicken Little Brigade seems to be getting bigger but the realists seem to be waking up to reality and talking about it!
I wasn’t so sure about believing about it not really being a hurricane, so, I did what people should do: look for verification. What I found was wind data from the NOAA for a 24 hour period from Hatteras Mitchell airport (NC), Currituck airport (NC), Cape May County airport, Belmar (NJ), and Atlantic City airport. NONE of them showed hurricane force wind readings at any point. These were all airports that should have been exposed to sustained 74+ mph wind, the definition of a hurricane. All right in the path. Yet, no 74+ readings? None? I have screenshots of these, if you want them, Steven. I posted them this am at my site, as well as Right Wing News
I also looked at many other airports on the coast of NC and up the coast which should have seen high winds, yet, not. Didn’t take screenshots, though.
Also, my parents live in Waretown, NJ, and the eye passed right over them. The lost power from midnight or so to 230pm….wait, back on that quick? We lost power in Raleigh for days to weeks after Fran passed by. I got power back in 2 days, and I was on an important circuit. I remember the devastation from what was just below hurricane force, and my parents aren’t seeing that in the area. Dad was out and about trying to get his coffee this morning, with no trouble. Drove down almost to Route 72 with no problems and few stop lights out.
I hate going down the conspiracy theory route, but, really, all those who denigrated you should look up the data themselves, and then ask themselves “WTF? Where are all the readings that say “Hurricane”?”
odd that they can claim Irene had a huge wind field….
….so big in fact, that even as a Cat 1 it would cause tidal surge like a 3 or 4
Yet, no one can find hurricane winds in that huge wind field
……it didn’t cause a surge like a Cat 3-4 either
I had a tree branch come down last week! Maybe Irene caused that also!
I just spend some time (while watching the game) looking at 24 hour data from the NYC airports, Central Park, Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Mass. NOAA reporting stations. Lots of screenshots. And not a one shows anything approaching hurricane force wind speeds. Highest speed at Kennedy Airport was 44 at 6pm today. La Guardia was 41 at 6am. Long Island was 38. Logan in Boston: 39. Bridgeport, Conn: 33. And so on.
It’s hard to believe that there could be a conspiracy, even a passive one, but, damn, it’s hard to dispute the data, eh?
I think the discrepancy, at least part of it, is coming from where the wind is measured, at what altitude.
With apologies to Spock, it was fascinating to witness. Much more fascinating than the actual squall……. It boggles the mind. I even had a post on it…….
No!!!! We really are all going to die in this storm of the century!!!! My neighbor even lost a shingle!!
Really big wind field! HUH?
I love that speech. Always sends shivers up my spine.
This is not the first instance of Hurricane winds reported higher than experienced. Some of this could be due to the measurement height of 10m or 33ft. However, my personal assessment is that this is an extrapolated value. The wind speeds aloft are measured, and the velocity at 10m is estimated. I have suspected this in severe thunderstorm warnings because many times the wind velocity seen in the outflow at radar measurement height are higher than what I measure. So what does this all mean? There is obviously a need for research on the remote measurement of wind fields and their relationship to surface winds.
The measured wind speeds were less than half of the NOAA claims. That is certainly not going to be accounted for by the difference between ground and ten meters.
I would agree that 20ft does not explain all of the variation, but is a component. The reliance of models and remote sensing have not been fully tested and verified, as can be seen in the Irene storm. Maybe it is time to focus the warnings to the area affected and not paint a large brush across a map.My greatest fear is that this will cause warning fatigue, and paint a unrealistic picture of these “Major Hurricanes”.
If you parse the language of NOAA published discussion (#30), NOAA said that “More so than most storms… the winds with Irene increase sharply with height above the surface.”
Perhaps the model they used was not the correct model, or given the implied uniqueness of Irene, maybe they don’t have a model for this type of tropical storm.
“accounted for by the difference between ground and ten meters.”
There you go again, trying to make sense of things.
;^)
I’m going to try to rephrase Percifield’s comments …. We can be confident that wind speeds determined by radar measurement (and likely measurements from aircraft) are accurate. From those accurate wind velocities at high altitude, estimates are made for wind speeds at 10m. The H. Irene experience and Percifield’s personal experience measuring actual wind velocities during severe thunderstorms don’t reconcile with the estimates derived from higher altitude wind velocities. Percifield concludes that the relationship between high altitude wind velocities and 10m wind velocities needs to be reevaluated to make the estimates better. (I agree with Percifield.)
Percifield is *not* claiming that there is a significant difference between ground-level and 10m wind speeds that can account for the H. Irene experience.
I loved this post, especially the last paragraph. I was saying exactly what you said in the last paragraph to my wife and Mom earlier today. I also made the comparison to how people blindly allow others to dictate what to believe no matter how much the evidence contradicts the claims. This is why this country has been going straight to hell. I caught on to this way of thinking more than 25 years ago. It was always so easy for me to see how the spin and lies never added up to the facts and evidence. It has truly amazed me to watch this one single thing allow the powers that be to dismantle this country all the while having most everyone believe that there was a good reason for each and every terrible thing they did. For decades I realized that people who could think for themselves would see any given news item and see it completely differently than most of the population. We need everyone to look at what just happened with Irene and realize there is a major disconnect somewhere and that maybe we should rely more on ourselves to understand the world around us and not to freely give the job to someone else. This has actually been happening a lot more in the past few years as people really are waking up to the fact that hardly anything is at it seems and that we are being lied to and are lying to ourselves. Great post!
Wow! Take a day off and miss all the fun, I guess I am guilty also, as I was watching wind gages too lol…. ah well the truth is the truth.
I would love to pose a question to someone over at NOAA about now… how can Jose be named as a tropica storm when it is not a cyclone and has no center of circulation… wind speed alone does not define a tropical storm. Center of circulation defines a cyclone…
They have “Improved” their requirements to name a “Storm” and what defines a “STORM”. Estimated wind speed lets them name a passing cloud if it is in the Tropics Between 0 and 60 latitude, as they also redefined the “Tropics”!
I live in Berkshire County MA, allegedly in the direct path of Irene. During the day Sunday we had almost no wind, heavy rain during the morning, minor to moderate flooding in the places that usually flood. All day the NWS kept issuing TS warnings and reporting 60-75 MPH sustained winds and I kept waiting for it. By noon the rain had tapered to heavy drizzle. At 5PM the center passed near our town (I think), wind shifted to West and became steady for several hours at 20-25 MPH, a few gusts in the 40′s. We lost power in the evening for two hours. Mon. AM, flooding had receded, no damage to be seen, not even a tree limb down. A remarkably unremarkable non-event.
FYI, this thread is discussed at FreeRepublic.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2770186/posts
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