Super Storm Hiayan is not so Super

That may well be, tell that to all the people affected by the typhoon. I'm sure it'll make them feel better, that they were "lucky", it could've been a lot worse.

 

Another teachable moment. Those interested will read about the Dvorak technique for cyclone strength classification. Learn which storms have maxed out that scale. Not many have. Rarer still to have a T8.0 strike land at strength.

However, I have yet to see a measured storm surge above 2.3 meters for Haiyan in Leyte. That is bad enough, given the terrain, but some advance predictions were ever so much higher.

 

Tip did not hit land. The latest data is that, based on wind speed, Haiyan is the most intense storm to ever make a landfall and the fourth most intense on record. The 1 minute wind peaks were 195mph with gusts to 235mph. The storm surge at the Tacloban airport was 5.2 meters...up to the second story on the terminal building.

 

The barometric pressure and max wind estimates are from Dvorak technique. Different organizations have analyzed Haiyan in that way and obtained minimum central pressures of 858 to 895 millibars. I cannot explain that disagreement but maybe it will get settled later.

This storm was not 'flown into' which is the gold standard. It is not done much these days - only by Taiwan and Japan to my knowledge, and only for nearby storms. The 'big-boy' drones (like Global Hawk) can do it, but they are costly. Perhaps it will be more widely done in the Asian area in the future.

I suppose that drysider is correct about ~5 m surge at Tacloban airport. As with the other matters, it can get sorted out later. Now the priority is to get the people thing sorted out. I doubt that downplaying this event has had any important negative effects on humanitarian efforts. Otherwise I would have been more surly in my responses

We are not there. I presume that PC people have responded as they see fit. I do appreciate teachable moments, whether served up by mojo or anyone else. It is all based on my presumption that PC people are smarter than average (just like Lake Woebegone) and interested to know how the science things get done.

If I have not mentioned before that 'citizen scientists' play an important role in classifying Dvorak storms images, then I have failed you all. It is not so different from Galaxy Zoo. It is something you can do with your eyeballs if you have time to spare. It is different from folding@home and seti@home etc. as those just want your computer CPU.

 

I am amazed that the Philippine military are not flying their helicopters to ferry in food and water. Or are they all destroyed.... I heard a sad story about a guy who died from a broken leg! If he had gotten a transfusion and some antibiotics, he would have made his 24th birthday. Tacloban City might just as well be bulldozed flat, and they rebuild it from the ground up, designed for a 200mph storm, with surge. Question is, how much will it cost, and who is going to pay!!!

 

I saw a lecture this year on analysing big data for big storms. The camera phones and twitter feeds are providing a ton of data about where these things hit, and what the major problems are in helping people recover. The talk was given by ibm, and they are providing some computer time and people to analyze these things. 10 years ago we didn't have the data, but citizen reporters seem to be providing the data needed to help recoveries in the future.

 

Absolutely the internet has enabled 'bottom up' data to contribute to crisis management, as well as many other things.

After a few more crises, I imagine that the aid providers will work together more smoothly in terms of areas (physical and topical) of capability, with google earth as a framework. It still seems like everybody rushes in, ad hoc, and gets in each others' way.

 

Bumped this because Philippines now a year later has Hagupit. More of a mid-strength storm, but slow forward motion and a track over more populated areas means that they probably are going to have a lot of flooding damage.

A year later, I wish I could tell you that Haiyan was 'not so super' and that 7000+ people did not die and Philippines had fully recovered. However we are stuck in reality.

 

Again back to Haiyan, now its been 13 months and one would expect somebody to write a paper about it for one of the met. journals. Put all the data together. To review, there where no flights into the storm (thus no dropsondes) so minimum central air pressure will never be known accurately. Ground level barometers near the eye track all blew out (unless I'm mistaken). There is something called Dvorak, based on visual analyses of satellite imagery. Haiyan pinned that at the maximum of 8.o.

Tip and others were stronger while at sea. Haiyan ranks somewhere high in the list in terms of strength at landfall. This could all be sorted out with a paper on the subject.

Meanwhile, if you like donating to such things, Hagupit is thumping away now, and there are relief agencies waiting to talk to you...

 

I'm not sure what merits a paper or a flight. The satellites tell most of the story, and we have the storm surge and deaths.
Typhoon Slams Philippines, Threatens Recovery From Haiyan; Test for Aquino - Bloomberg
Haiyan (Northwestern Pacific Ocean) | NASA

The two theories of ghg influencing storms is higher frequency (and this counts as 1, and we seem to be in higher ghg enviroment with fewer big storms like this) and higher intensity (and sst would not merrit chages of catagory based on gcc theory, I'm sure someone could pin down if this was likely 2% or 3% more intense, but that would likely had caused the damage if it was less intense). It takes many of these storms to test the theories, and I'm sure if this was an outlier and it could be shown to have been caused by ghg there would be a paper, instead my guess is someone will look at the last few decades and come up with a good paper summerizing all

In the meantime with or without lots of human manufactured ghg

That means people in Japan and the Philippines need to be prepared for these things, and burning lots of fossil fuels probably doesn't help matters.

Super Typhoon Haiyan: How intense and how do we know? | Earth | EarthSky

 

I feel confident that BAMS would publish a Haiyan-only paper. There were lots of satellite data including TRMM, anything below 900 mB is a big deal, it was at least among the strongest at landfall, and Philippines is right up there on the list of disaster-sensitive countries.

Dvorak 8.0 means that the eyewall was beautiful for a long time. You just don't get that from 99/100 hurricanes. Evidence that this one powered up from more than the heat in the top few meters of ocean water. There were a bunch of things that just couldn't have been monitored for Tip because that one came when satellites were much less clever.

If one has concerns that hurricanes might get stronger with warmer (warmer/deeper) oceans, then one would certainly consider this as an example and wring everything possible out of the data.

 

well we have an 8 or 8.1 on Dvorak scale, class 5 in the Saffir-Simpson scale, I was being sarcastic when I mentioned that this might be an outlier. I just don't know if people know anything more about the sparse data

Here we see the deadly 10
Typhoons in the Philippines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But the deadliest was in 1881. To really analyse what is going on in the philippines it would be great to go back to the 1867 typhoon that was the 4th deadliest, but we really only have really good data on land fall and surrounding waters in the satelite error. It makes this sparse data hard to analyses.

The biggest benefit is if early warnings were better as it would lead to less loss of life. Low lying islands in this zone are just going to get hit. Better prediction and evacuation can save lots of lives.

 

Apparently, Hagupit showed lots of track variation among mesoscale models so this one was hard to predict. N of Manila or S of Tacloban?

One factor that has changed a lot is scale of evacuations. 40+ years ago this was not the done thing. This time about 500,000 people were moved. Cyclones are unique among major events (+maybe some volcanoes?) as now becoming predictable on useful time scales.

Surface-water heat ahead of any storm's track looks important for when they massively expand. Part of the Haiyan story, but seen also for other cyclones. I don't know that this gets considered in mesoscale models. Wxman, help!