[Vision2020] UCS's Brenda Ekwurzel: Hurricane Sandy: Heating of the Oceans Fuels Record Storm: More Energy Than Hurricane Katrina!

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Sat Nov 3 15:20:43 PDT 2012


*A few comments from Brenda Ekwurzel from the Union of Concerned Scientists
(bio here:  http://www.ucsusa.org/news/experts/brenda-ekwurzel.html ) are
copied in below from an interview on "Democracy Now," the full transcript
and interview of which is at the website lower down.

I was surprised by how certain she appears that Hurricane Sandy's
destructive power was made worse by above normal ocean water temps and
increased atmospheric water vapor, thus arguing it seems that indeed global
warming in this specific case contributed to the power of this cyclone.
Many climate scientists try to avoid saying global warming contributed to
any one single severe weather event.

It does seem to me to be a rather simple matter of physics, that warmer
ocean water will add more fuel to a cyclone, and increased rainfall
contribute to the uprooting of trees, though I don't want to oversimplify
what is a very complex climate, weather and environmental problem.

In analyzing the intensity of cyclones wind speed and Saffir-Simpson
categories can be misleading.  A cat. 1 hurricane with a wind field of
tropical force winds extending over a huge area may have more total energy
than a cat. 3 with a much smaller wind field.

Some of the analyses I have read on cyclone intensity responding to
anthropogenic climate change appear, unless I misunderstand, to not fully
take into account what is called "Integrated Kinetic Energy" to measure the
total energy in a cyclone.

According to the article below, from **Brian
McNoldy<http://andrew.rsmas.miami.edu/bmcnoldy/>,
a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of
Marine and Atmospheric Science,.**Hurricane Sandy had more energy than
Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, though at landfall Sandy
was a cat. 1, Katrina a cat. 3:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/sandy-packed-more-total-energy-than-katrina-at-landfall/2012/11/02/baa4e3c4-24f4-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/31/global_warming_and_sandy_heating_of#transcript

BRENDA EKWURZEL:* Sure. What was very important with this storm, Sandy, is
it was charting through waters heading north in above-normal sea surface
temperature conditions, and that allowed it to thrive as a hurricane. So by
the time it made landfall on New Jersey, it was still a Category 1
hurricane, which means warm waters are fueling this hurricane so that it
has much higher wind potential, which is far more damaging to people who
have structures that are in the path of the hurricane.

*BRENDA EKWURZEL:* The other factor is that the warmer atmosphere can hold
more water vapor, and so there’s vast tracts of the United States on the
Eastern Seaboard and all over, all the way up to Chicago and other places
up to Maine, Florida, that had torrential rainstorms that were sustained.
So that means that you can uproot trees, and they are more easily to be
blown over, because you’ve saturated the soils, and they increase the water
levels. What’s different from Hurricane Irene is, luckily, in some parts of
the United States, we have less soil saturation compared to the situations
with Hurricane Irene, which caused massive flooding in Vermont and other
places. And so, there are some places like Pennsylvania where the
conditions were wet, but other parts of the United States that were a
little drier and needed some rain. But this is such a situation where the
warmer atmosphere, the warmer oceans, are something that helped power this
particular hurricane.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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