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Hurricane Ida looks like the dangerous sequel to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the worst storm in American history. But there are some twists and turns that have yet to come that may make Ada more annoying in some aspects, but not so terrible in others.
Ida is expected to make landfall on the same calendar date on August 29, just like Hurricane Katrina did 16 years ago. After rapid intensification after similar deep warm water, it hits the same area of ​​Louisiana at roughly the same wind speed. . Intensify the hurricane.
What may be different is crucial: direction and size.
Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said, “This may be more like a natural disaster, and Katrina’s big problem is more like a man-made disaster. “Because the dyke failed. The failure of the embankment pushed the death toll from Hurricane Katrina to 1,833, and its total damage reached approximately US$176 billion. Experts don’t expect Ada to approach these totals.
Different directions
Ada is coming to the same place from a slightly different direction. Several hurricane experts worry that different angles may make New Orleans more dangerous than in the storm quadrant of Hurricane Katrina (the front right of the hurricane), when the city was more damaged by the embankment than by the storm surge. The northeast quadrant of Hurricane Katrina promoted a storm surge of 8.5 meters (28 feet) in Mississippi instead of New Orleans.
McNaughty said that Ada’s “angle could be worse.”Because it’s smaller, “it’s not so easy to generate huge storm surges… but the angle it comes in, I think it’s more conducive to pushing water into the lake [Pontchartrain]”.
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who performed the hurricane mission for the government and founded Weather Underground, said that Ida’s northwest path not only made New Orleans more attention than Katrina, but also It also targets more of Baton Rouge and key industrial areas. He said that Ada is expected to pass through “the worst hurricane.”
“It is predicted that the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is one of the important infrastructure areas in the United States, which is vital to the economy. There are hundreds of major industrial bases there. I mean petrochemical bases. One is the 15 largest ports in the United States and a nuclear power plant,” Masters said. “You may have to close the Mississippi River to allow barges to pass for several weeks.”
“It’s not just the coastal impact. It’s not just New Orleans,” said meteorologist Steve Bowen, head of global disaster insights at risk and consulting firm Aon. “Of course we are looking at potential losses in the billions of dollars.”
Size matters
The difference in size is not only physically huge, but also important for damage. Because of the wider thrust of the water, storms with larger widths have greater storm surges.
Ada” will not produce a huge storm surge like Katrina, it will have a more concentrated storm surge, such as [1969’s Hurricane] Camille”, Masters said.
But Bowen said that larger storms tend to be weaker. There is a trade-off between strong damage in a smaller area and damage in a smaller area, but it is still bad in a larger area. Bowen and Princeton University’s Gabriel Vecchi said they didn’t know which situation would be worse in this case.
Rapid intensification
Ada is about to encounter so-called loop current eddy currents. The loop current is a deep piece of this incredibly warm water. It takes warm water from the Yucatan Peninsula, forms a loop in the Gulf of Mexico, and then spins upwards along the eastern edge of Florida into the Gulf Stream. Water above 26 degrees Celsius (79 degrees Fahrenheit) is hurricane fuel.
Normally, when a storm strengthens or stops, it will absorb all the warm water in the area and then encounter colder water, thereby starting to weaken the storm or at least prevent it from strengthening further. But these warm waters continue to intensify storms.
Hurricane Katrina started in this way, and Ida is expected to do the same. McNaughty said that the whirlpool that Ida will pass through has the necessary warm water, which is more than 150 meters (500 feet) deep, “just a hot tub.” This means a lot of rapid intensification.
“Run these loop currents [eddys] It’s a big deal. It’s really dangerous,” said Kosin, a climate and hurricane scientist at Climate Services. “It can be explosive. “
Kossin and Vecchi said that in the past 40 years, more hurricanes have been rapidly increasing at a more frequent rate, and climate change seems to be at least partly responsible. The hurricane-style lace has increased rapidly this year, and last year Hannah, Laura, Sally, Teddy, Gamma and Delta have all increased rapidly.
“It has human fingerprints on it,” said Kosin, who participated in a 2019 study on recent rapid intensification with Vecchi.
New eye wall
Kosin said that after the hurricane intensified rapidly, it became so strong, and its wind eye was so small that it usually could not continue to maintain this state, so it formed an outer wind eye wall, while the inner eye The wall collapsed. This is the so-called eye wall replacement.
Kosin said that when a new wind eye wall is formed, the storm usually gets bigger but weaker. Therefore, the key to Ida is when and whether this will happen. This happened to Hurricane Katrina, which weakened steadily in the 12 hours before landing.
However, McNaughty said that many other forces, such as the crosswind that weakened Hurricane Katrina at the last minute, did not exist for Ida.
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