September 12, 2008
Weather Department
The Texas Tornado Meets a Texas Hurricane
They call Chicago the Windy City, but that was always a reference to members of our political class, not our weather. This weekend, the real windy city is going to be Houston, Texas, which is going to be hit hard by hurricane Ike.
When I was a kid, I used to wonder if we could prevent hurricanes from killing people by using an atom bomb to disrupt the circular winds and make the hurricane collapse. It turns out that hurricanes are much bigger than atom bombs. The mushroom cloud would just blow away in the wind, like everything else.
I looked up the math at the NOAA and Wikipedia, and here's how it works out: The bomb that hit Hiroshima had a total energy yield of 6.7x1013 Joules. A large hurricane generates that much energy in about 1/9th of a second. Call it 32,000 Hiroshimas per hour.
That's what's headed for Houston tonight.
Fortunately, most of that energy is expended raising millions of millions of tons of air from sea level to the stratosphere. Only a tiny fraction of it is converted to wind, and only a tiny fraction of that brushes against anything on the ground. But it's still going to make a big mess.
Ike isn't going to be another Katrina, though. Most of the killing done by hurricanes is due to the storm surge---water pushed ahead of the leading edge of the hurricane. Unlike New Orleans, Most of Houston is safely above sea level.
I wouldn't want to be on Galveston Island, however. It was completely submerged by the surge from the hurricane that hit it in 1900. They have a seawall now, but parts of it are already flooding.
And for residents who don't evacuate from certain areas around Galveston Bay, the National Weather Service forecast is "certain death." Seriously.
All this is bad news for the only person I know in Houston, Mark Bennett, pictured here:
He's 50 miles from Galveston Island, 25 miles from the bay, and high enough above sea level that he doesn't have to worry about the surge. On the other hand, the projected storm track goes right over him, so he'll get some really high winds.
(The NOAA puts those red lines on the side for a reason, so Ike could pass to either side of him, or weaken before making landfall, but the best current guess puts the center of the storm within 3 miles of his house.)
I think Mark will be fine, but I predict some home repair in his future.
.
Leave a comment