Monday, August 29, 2005

Katrina's Course

Katrina "weakened" to 145 mph winds before she came ashore this morning. I found a weather station with hourly observation data and it's interesting to see the storm coming in via data. The last observation was about two hours ago (the station may not be functional now, but here's the course through this morning). This is from the New Orleans Lakefront Airport station (pressure in inches, rain for the last one-hour period):

Date...Time.......Wind...........Visibility...Pressure....Rain
29.......6:53....NE 69 G 86........0.25..........28.59.......1.23
29.......5:53....NE 61 G 84........0.25..........28.81........1.72
29.......4:53....NE 54 G 71.........0.5...........28.96........0.58
29.......3:53....NE 54 G 85........0.5............29.12........1.8
29.......2:53....NE 44 G 56........1.0............29.24........0.75
29.......1:53....NE 52 G 68........1.0............29.32.........0.55
29.......0:53....NE 44 G 56........2.0...........29.4..........0.16
28......23:53...NE 43 G 56........2.5............29.45.........0.10
28......22:53...NE 39 G 49........6.0............29.5...........0.03
28.......21.53...NE 40 G 48........10.0..........29.54.........0.01
28......20:53....NE 37 G 45........10.0..........29.56.........0.0
28.......19:53....NE 29 G 39.........8.0..........29.58.........0.08
28.......18:53....N 24 G 31...........6.0...........29.59..........0.04

If you've never been through a hurricane (I grew up in Corpus Christi, on the Texas Gulf Coast, and there were several hurricanes there when I was a kid), you can see by the weather data that there's very much a kind of grinding progression. It's like a vise closing, really, and very much unlike the sudden explosiveness of a tornado. And this is a very, very big storm, so it's going to last probably eleven or twelve hours front to back, which is incredible.

Hopefully I can get the rest of the observations for this morning and include them later.

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