Weather

It's cold sat here behind the screen. The weather's turned suddenly, from unnaturally hot to unusually cold and suddenly wintry. Exactly as I mentioned happened in the Arctic recently.
It's been a strange day in Holland today. Here in the North of the country, we've had exceptional rainfall. Dijks - levees to Americans - are being sandbagged in some parts of the province. In the West, there have been sustained windspeeds around hurricane strength, and gusts over 100mph. In the east, there has been heavy snowfall. Tonight there are emergency shelters set up and motorists being rescued from their snowbound cars, trapped in the worst evening rush hour on record (despite Friday being traditionally the quiet day).
Now bear in mind we're not talking about a wilderness place here. The Netherlands is the most man-made, overdeveloped landscape in the world. It's not a place of extremes and unpredictability, yet this storm - although expected for a few days, has turned out to be much more unusual and savage than was expected. The thing with being such a small country, is that relatively minor changes in the path of a storm can have major national-level impacts. And, whilst I'll have to wait and see more detail, it seems this storm has curved around the country rather strangely, it seems the temperature differentials have been more severe than predicted, and the cold has been colder so we've had big wind and dry snow.
It's as nothing to the hurricane season in the North Atlantic that is now drawing to a close of course. At the moment, it looks like Tropical Storm Delta - or its remnants - is going to hit the Canaries at the end of next week, having meandered for a while and then done a turn around and headed back towards the African coast. Which should make it an ideal companion for the unprecedented Vince, the only Tropical Storm ever to hit the Spanish mainland.
Vince was one of the weirdest storms on record, but the next one along was even more bizarre: Wilma. I think the thing every storm geek will remember about Wilma is the mind-blowing period of intensification, when she went from a Tropical Storm to having the lowest recorded storm pressure on record. This despite heavy shear, and even more unbelievably, having an eye that shrank to little more than one nautical mile across. (Bear in mind that a hurricane of this intensity would normally have an eye more than 40 miles across). I think Steve Gregory captured it best, describing it at one point as basically a Cat 5 tornado.
Wilma wasn't the first hurricane in the season to produce this phase of rapid intensification. Rita did it earlier, also blowing up to a terrifying Cat 5 that barreled across the Gulf. And if there is one place that can really be said to have dodged the bullet this season, it's Galveston. The place that was destroyed by a storm in 1900 was in the crosshairs of Rita for quite some time, but luckily for the large urban centres, Rita turned at the last and smashed into the bayou of West Louisiana. Some small towns down there were decimated, like Cameron, La. which have been sadly under-reported.
Equally under-reported was the most destructive hurricane of the season, with the tragi-comic name of Stan. Thousands died in Central America, primarily in Guatemala, where a couple of villages were decimated in landslides that basically wiped out the entire population.
Above all, though, the 2005 season will of course be remembered for Katrina. There are books to be written about this, and I'm sure those books are probably already out there. So I'll try not to turn this into another one.
The first thing I remember is Katrina being another storm hanging off Florida, but even then we knew she would cross Florida and intensify. The waters of the Gulf were already warm enough to expect a major hurricane, and the other weather conditions were already presuming a landfall anywhere between Eastern texas and the Florida Panhandle. That's a big margin of error, but this was clearly going to be a big storm, and this was more than a week before landfall.
By the time she'd crossed Florida, taking a bit of an unexpected wander, and killing 11 people in the process, the period of intensification began. Now, by Thursday evening our time, this storm had blown up into an absolute monster. Huge, enormous, she'd become an absolute holy terror! The crosshairs were narrowing, and they were close enough to New Orleans that I told the wife that I was getting really worried, that I felt the authorites in New Orleans were becoming criminally negligent in not evacuating the city.
She thought I was exaggerating and worrying too much, but already the movement in the forecast was swinging from the Panhandle across to Nola and it just seemed that it was going to keep on going that way across. And thanks to the guys at the Weather Underground blogs who educated me alot about the nature of these storms this year. But everyone was seeing the possibility of a monster coming, even if the National Hurricane Center was being cautious back on that Thursday.

KATRINA IS EXPECTED TO STRENGTHEN TO 90 KT BEFORE
LANDFALL OCCURS IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE. THIS IS CONSISTENT WITH
THE SHIPS INTENSITY MODEL AND THE TREND IN THE GFDL MODEL...
ALTHOUGH THE LATTER MODEL MAKES KATRINA A 118-KT CATEGORY 4 STORM.

By the Saturday afternoon, it was clear that disaster was looming for New Orleans, and still they were pissing around with not ordering a mandatory evacuation. Already by then it was also becoming clear that if this was the dreaded nightmare scenario, then the authorities were approaching a state of criminal neglect.

The day Katrina struck was the day after my birthday. Andrew struck on my birthday 13 years earlier, so I guess we know when the peak of the season is :-) I was camping with the family, and listening to news reports from downtown French Quarter New Orleans of how this could all have been much worse. It didn't ring true to me, and later of course I discovered that even while they were making their positive reports, the Lower Ninth was already flooding from the overtopping of the levees, and the canal at English Avenue was reaching saturation point.
When I got home, I got to see some raw news footage, unedited, of a helicopter flight over Gulfport and Biloxi, and the state of those places reminded me most directly of Banda Aceh after the tsunami last Christmas. An unnerving scene of rubble, of hotels and casins ripped apart, thrown onto highways, of private homes blown apart as if they had been bombed. I saw that chopper footage and knew this was way beyond anything America had experienced in living memory. Even Andrew wasn't like this, and someone reminded me that after Andrew moved off, the initial reports there too were positive, until the real extent of the mess was unveiled.

As to what happened afterwards, well, that's not something I'm going to go into now. That Bush had the nerve to say "nobody expected the levees to fail" really says enough.
The best analysis of the situation came from a meteorologit, Jeff Masters. This is a guy who flew into Hurricane Hugo with the Hurrican Hunters and damn near died. Not an activist then, but his piece on Katrina is incendiary, is something Chomsky could be proud of. Tonight on the National Geographic Channel is the special 'Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster'. That was the name of Jeff's piece too, but I doubt if NGS will be quite this blunt:

"...there was little effort given to formulate a plan to evacuate the 100,000 poor residents of New Orleans with no transportation of their own for a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. To do so would have cost tens of millions of dollars, money that neither the city, nor the state, nor the federal government was willing to spend. Why spend money that would be wasted on a bunch of poor people? The money was better spent on projects to please the politicians' wealthy campaign contributors. So the plan was to let them die. And they died, as we experts all knew they would. Huge numbers of them. We don't know how many for sure. Since the plan was to let them die, the city of New Orleans made sure they had a good supply of body bags on hand. Only 10,000 body bags, but since Katrina didn't hit New Orleans head-on, 10,000 will probably be enough."

Read it and weep.
Then get angry. Because it's not just this twisted eugenics leading to negligent homicide that is the problem, but the climate change that Americans - even liberals and storm bloggers - seem all too keen to deny. The reason that someone like me on the other side of the world is now looking really closely at what's going on with the weather in the North-West Atlantic. My North Atlantic Conveyor starts over there, so I'm really hoping those Americans are going to wake up to the damage their overconsumption is doing real soon. But more of that on another blog.