Does climate change have any hand in Ike and the annihilation of Galveston?

That's a very interesting post, tochatihu. Thanks for the link, mate.

 

That's correct. The answer is no.

 

It is a blog - read for interest but believe at your own intellectual risk!

 

A couple of first hand observations. Ike raised the water level in the entire Gulf of Mexico. The water levels actually flooded low parts of St. Petersburg with the center of Ike in the Middle of the Gulf. I walked down to the docks and the water level was as high as I have ever seen it as a sustained level while Ike was in the Gulf. That takes lots of horsepower.

The Category of a Hurricane has very, very little relevance to the energy in a storm/hurricane. This is a first hand observation. Charlie (2004) was a Cat 4 storm that came ashore south of where I live. We felt absolutely no winds and the intense winds were extremely concentrated. It was an extremely small hurricane. Later that season, Jeanne (2004) crossed Florida as a Cat 1/2 but when the eye was by the west coast of Florida, the highest winds were measured at Daytona Beach, a hundred miles from the center. The winds were low in intensity, but covered all of Florida. It shook out my oak trees with a vengence. Very big hurricane. Ike was one monster hurricane.

I spend the last week in Dayton, OH and noticed vastly more damage from Ike in Dayton than all of Florida.

 

This wiki

Accumulated cyclone energy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

squares the wind speed times duration. FL_Prius_Driver is correct (I think) to criticize any measurement that does not also take into account the size of the wind field. Ike had a large storm surge (it reflooded some Gustav-flooded areas near New Orleans) in part because of the size of its wind field.

Kerry Emanuel (MIT) cubes the windspeed instead, which favors the larger (category) storms even more. A map of that metric, adjusted for duration over each 0.1 degree block of the US "hurricane coastline" for all the storms since 1851 (HURDAT best tracks) is very interesting, even though it's guesswork to estimate the size of the windfields of the older storms. If I get off my butt and finish that analysis maybe publishable. In the meantime, CIESIN's map

News Archive - The Earth Institute at Columbia University

is the best available. For the size of (recent) windfields, see NHC's "wind swaths" archive.