Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (416653)	9/12/2008 12:11:14 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578938

"I don't know if i can find the article, but there is a guy who says the cat system, based on wind speed, is inadequate." He has a good point. One problem is the nature of the storms has changed over the decades. There are a lot more intense storms that form in the Caribbean or the Gulf instead of off the coast of Africa. So those storms tend to be smaller, even if their intensity is up there.

To: Road Walker who wrote (416653)	9/12/2008 12:11:41 PM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1578938

Actually found this on a blog... At the Weather Underground (one of the first good weather sites, founded and still located in Ann Arbor), Jeff Masters explains why we need to worry about Ike. What he says is that the Saffir-Simpson category of the hurricane (1, 2, etc.) is not the most important aspect. The Saffir-Simpson category is based upon the wind speed. Meteorologists are developing a different model. The new model is based upon kinetic energy, as opposed to wind speed. Ironically, the acronym is IKE: Integrated Kinetic Energy. The amount of water Ike has put in motion is about 10% greater than what Katrina did, and thus we can expect Ike's storm surge damage will be similar to or greater than Katrina's. The way we can estimate this damage potential is to compute the total energy of Ike's surface winds (kinetic energy). To do this, we must look at how strong the winds are, and factor in the areal coverage of these winds. Thus, we compute the Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE) by squaring the velocity of the wind and summing over all regions of the hurricane with tropical storm force winds or higher. This "Integrated Kinetic Energy" was recently proposed by Dr. Mark Powell of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division as a better measure of the destructive power of a hurricane's storm surge than the usual Category 1-5 Saffir-Simpson scale. For example, Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi as a strong Category 3 hurricane, yet its storm surge was more characteristic of a Category 5 storm. Dr. Powell came up with a new scale to rate potential storm surge damage based on IKE (not to be confused with Hurricane Ike!) The new scale ranges from 1-6. Katrina and Wilma at their peaks both earned a 5.1 on this scale (Figure 2). At 12:30pm EDT today, Ike earned a 5.2 on this scale, the second highest kinetic energy of any Atlantic storm in the past 40 years. [emphasis added] In other words, this is serious. This chart (from Weather Underground) compares the IKE of Ike to other major storms: scienceblogs.com