SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Live Science reports:
Hurricane Patricia is currently churning in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and weather forecasters are calling it the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Communities in southern Mexico, where the hurricane is expected to make landfall later today (Oct. 23), are already preparing for a "potentially catastrophic" storm.
[...] Hurricane Patricia is a Category 5 storm--the highest on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale that is used to gauge a storm's intensity--and is expected to have winds of nearly 200 miles per hour (325 km/h) with even higher gusts, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).
[...] Category 5 storms typically have winds of at least 157 mph (252 km/h), but Patricia is special; earlier today, the NHC said Hurricane Patricia is the strongest hurricane on record in the area the center monitors, which includes the Atlantic. (Before Patricia, the strongest hurricane measured in the Western Hemisphere was Wilma in 2005, with top wind speeds of 175 mph, or 282 km/h.)
In the coverage by NPR (formerly National Public Radio), meteorologist Ryan Maue, PhD notes:
as a Category 5 storm, Patricia is at the top of the Saffir-Simpson scale. If the categories went higher (as some have suggested in recent years), it would actually be labeled Category 7.
takyon: National Hurricane Center
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @06:02PM
The link says the actual wind speed turned out to be 165. This may be a classic case of expectation bias: "The wind speed must be increasing, our theory says they have to."
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday October 24 2015, @06:37PM
I'm wondering about that as well. I just read a different story linked from Google News that also had the 165 mph figure. I remember the other story reported winds in excess of 200 mph. Maybe a metric/imperial units error? I certainly no expert in this field. TFA may have the answer!
From the NPR article (dateline 2015-10-23):
Thursday Patricia went from a weak tropical storm to a top-of-the-scale Category 5 hurricane in just 25 hours. It's believed to be the fastest strengthening ever observed. And it's likely to get stronger. Some models show the storm could reach sustained winds of 220 mph. That's unheard of.
So, it'll be interesting to see how correct “some” models are, not to make light of the people in shantytowns that will likely be completely destroyed and need to rebuild from nothing.
If anything, this means that we need to keep funding NOAA so they can keep their models and hardware up to date. Remember that it was only advanced models that allowed NOAA to predict Sandy hitting the east coast, giving folks there time to prepare. Without those models, Sandy could have been a lot worse of a disaster.
(Score: 2) by BK on Saturday October 24 2015, @08:04PM
This is normal --
Measurements by aircraft are almost always high. Sustained winds measured from the ground are almost always lower. Sure there are gusts... but that's not part of the scale we're talking about.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @08:27PM
It's normal to compare estimates known to be biased to actual historical data? No, that is a sign of pseudoscience.
(Score: 2) by BK on Saturday October 24 2015, @11:44PM
Agreed. The article attempted to convince us to do something based on pseudoscience.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2015, @12:28AM
It did hit 200mph on the 23rd. [noaa.gov]
A history to pick through. [google.com]
Wikipedia's coverage includes a chart of the Most intense Pacific hurricanes [wikipedia.org]
More biggies [6abc.com]
A converter [google.com]
-- gewg_