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Houston and Hurricane Harvey - Overview and On-Line Resources
Houston, Texas (the 4th most populous city in the USA) is located in Harris County (the 3rd most populous in the country) and has been under the onslaught of Hurricane Harvey which was later downgraded to a tropical storm. Current rain totals over the course of the storm have exceeded 40 inches in some locations — additional rain of up to 10 more inches is predicted. Flooding is rampant and the damage to property is immense. So far, 5 people have been reported dead as a result of the storm. Gathered here are a number of on-line resources followed by a story questioning why mandatory evacuations were not called for earlier. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) reports the failure of a large number of cell towers, cable and phone lines.
Online Resources:
- Houston Chronicle — largest local newspaper.
- Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Houston/Galveston — river, stream, and lake water levels... and forecasts.
- Harris County Flood Control District - Storm Center
- Harris County Flood Warning System — interactive map with water gauges
- NWS - Current Conditions and 7-Day Forecast
- NWS - Weather observations for the last three days — temperature, barometric pressure, wind, and rain amounts over the last 3 days.
- NWS - Graphical Forecast
- click2houston — collection of news and links (From local TV station?).
- How Harvey went from a little-noticed storm to a behemoth — appears in the Tampa Bay Times but originally appeared in The Washington Post
- US National Hurricane Center — part of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
- FCC - Hurricane Harvey — scroll down to "Communications Status Reports"
Why Wasn't an Official Evacuation Order Issued?
As I type this, a historic weather event is crushing south Texas with enormous amounts of rain and massive flooding leaving thousands of people in need of rescue.
So why wasn't an official evacuation order issued? Last Friday Governor Greg Abbott (R) urged people to evacuate, even if it was not mandatory. Shortly after the governor's press conference, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) sent a tweet advising people not rush to evacuate, saying no evacuation orders have been issued. Mayor Sylvester also addressed what he called "unfounded rumors," releasing a statement that said, "...Rumors are nothing new, but the widespread use of social media has needlessly frightened many people today."
Harris County's emergency management office also tried to debunk via Twitter, what it called "false emails & FB posts" on August 24, suggesting people ignore the messages. The post it shared predicted 50 inches of rain (which experts are now also predicting) and 100,000 homes destroyed (it's not clear how many homes are currently flooded in Houston). All of which prompted people to wonder:
You said this was fake news but yet everything this "false" message said is happening. Two days ago we could've evacuated. https://t.co/ORtTyEodQt
— Pickle Heidy (@cheidyy_) August 27, 2017
To be fair, Mayor Sylvester had a good reason for not issuing an evacuation. In 2005 more than 100 people died during the evacuation of Houston for Hurricane Rita.
Source: Heavy.com
Why Evacuating Major Cities Before a Hurricane can be Deadly
[Ed Addition] The Houston Chronicle has an excellent piece, Why evacuating major cities before a hurricane can be deadly:
When Hurricane Rita barreled toward Texas in 2005, for example, an exodus of about 3 million people contributed to at least 73 deaths — though some have estimated as many as 107 — before the storm.
"Traffic jams stretched across hundreds of miles over two days, and many people ran out of gas," reporters Jim Malewitz and Brandon Formby wrote in The Texas Tribune. "Dozens died from accidents and heat-related illnesses, all before Rita even made landfall."
Had Harris County issued an evacuation order even several days in advance, a similar backup may have ensued — and it could have happened on roads that quickly got flooded with several feet of fast-moving water.
See the story for amazing pictures comparing dry and flooded highways.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 30 2017, @11:07AM (11 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 30 2017, @12:10PM (10 children)
Whether you care or not is a personal choice. Don't include me in your "don't have to care"
More clear now?
Did you include New Yorkers in your "we don't have to care"? It wasn't evident.
(. [xkcd.com])
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:25AM (9 children)
That's why I don't care that you care. I care instead for evidence of serious problems, a thing which has long been lacking in climate research.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 31 2017, @08:54AM (8 children)
Right! Let the New Yorkers (and Texans lately) be flooded without caring. Because someone on SN decreed there are only "Slightly higher energy storms", citing for that "slightly" attribute an increase in the population in India.
(see the non-linear response of water vapor pressure with the temperature [wikipedia.org] - a 0.5C increase means a higher increase in the water in the atmosphere if starting at 20.5 than when starting at 20. And don't forget that more water in atmosphere means more energy trapped [wikipedia.org] in places where the evaporation is stronger).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 31 2017, @10:38PM (6 children)
I thought we established that was the natural of real processes? That they tend to happen no matter the level or targeting of caring.
That would be true even if the "response" were sublinear, but increasing. This is particularly relevant since over small changes in temperature, water vapor pressure is near linear.
And more sunlight reflected. Not really seeing the point of your hyperventilating here. Weather is more than just some positive feedback mechanism for global warming. In fact, it's likely a strong negative feedback mechanism due to the enhanced transmission of heat to space that happens with storms.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 01 2017, @03:34AM (5 children)
Falling of a cliff happens naturally. You won't fall of a cliff if you care not to step outside that cliff.
(i.e. we didn't establish anything)
Only when they condense in a cloud. Until then, they trap more energy (harder cool to condensation level).
Remind yourself of non-linear systems and how such a system may respond with a hurricane due to a butterfly wing flap (quite old one but still used as a metaphor here).
Start with something simple, like competitive Lotka-Volttera [wikipedia.org] with multiple species [wikipedia.org] competing on the solar flux as a "food source".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:02AM (4 children)
I suspect you are mistaken here, but it's not worth pursuing.
But they condense into clouds quite often. There's not much point to considering only a part when the whole is very different.
The real catch here is that enhanced cooling from weather is done IMHO more through storms than through increased reflection of solar radiation. I just don't think it takes much of an increase in storms to keep up with the increased heat absorption from global warming.
That's not relevant to the situation. Vapor pressure is just a curve of pressure versus temperature. A small change in one parameter still results in a small change in the other. It's not a dynamical system with chaos over a large section of the parameter space.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 01 2017, @06:19AM (3 children)
But they condense into clouds quite often.
That's an assumption, it needs verifying.
Hint: [wikipedia.org] - that 0.5C increase in global temperature gets 20% (on average) more atmospheric moisture above Boulder, Colorado. I couldn't call it negligible and I wouldn't bet the location is somehow special.
So you keep saying. Doesn't make it necessarily true.
(what exactly do you say is not a dynamical system?)
Earth's atmosphere is. And small variation in one of the parameters may have non-trivial consequences on the accumulated values of the others over the time of days [wikipedia.org].
With ocean waters, it will happen even over the time of months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:58AM (2 children)
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. I'll note your linked chart doesn't support your assertion. Note that Boulder is 1.7 km in elevation and this graph covers air at 20-22 km in altitude and they don't list what the temperature is up there. You are assuming the temperature is higher, but that's not supported by the evidence. The blurb accompanying the graph indicates that the researchers thought that 30% of the increase was due to increased methane in the atmosphere. So even if it were as you presented, you just lost 30% of your increase from increased methane production.
I stated in my post what that was:
As I noted at the time, it's quite irrelevant that the atmosphere is chaotic when the relevant nonlinear curve is not even a dynamical system. And chaos is not a blank check to violate the laws of physics. There's no black winged butterfly that can flap and create permanent, global hurricanes. Perturbation can make a system greatly different, but it's not going to change the overall distribution of weather.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 01 2017, @07:31AM (1 child)
Unless, of course, that's not my assertion. (I did say "More energy captured by atmosphere, more excessive events")
You asserted "0.5C increase is temp produces does not increase the vapors in atmosphere significantly, because the clouds condense quite often and reflect the light".
I provided that as an example to "0.5C increase in the average temperature seem to have non-negligible effects in other parameters, you need to support your assertion".
Nope, I'm assuming there's more energy trapped into the atmosphere the release of which creates more extreme weather events.
And? Did I say "the nonlinearity of that curve is the only thing that needs to be considered"? I remember that, immediately after, I said something on the line of "add to that non-linearity of the curve the non-linear trait of the atmosphere's behavior".
---
(I will admit I started to grow bored by this discussion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @08:39AM
Well, you did type what I quoted ("that 0.5C increase in global temperature gets 20% (on average) more atmospheric moisture above Boulder, Colorado"). I just copied and pasted it word for word.
Why the use of quotes? Let's correct what you wrote here. First, I agree that a 0.5 C increase in temperature doesn't increase significantly the moisture content of atmosphere. You glued to that a response to a different assertion you made.
In the next couple of posts, we did the cloud thing where I clarified my observation that clouds are common (which incidentally, you can confirm by going outside on a regular and looking for clouds in the sky. most places have bunches of them). At no point did I ever claim that clouds reduced moisture content of the atmosphere by reflecting light or other mechanism.
So you badly paraphrased two different statements of mine, combining them in a way that was nonsense and then by putting quotes around that, gave it the appearance of something I actually said. I'm sure it was an accident, but you might want to think about why that wasn't a good use of your time. Let us note that this is the second time just in this thread where you've badly paraphrased something I wrote:
I sense a trend.
That's even more disconnected from your assertion:
At this point, you have no clue whether the changes observed and recorded in the chart you linked have a thing to do with global warming (even if we choose to grant your unfounded assertion that moisture content actually did go up by 20%). You've invoked a non-falsifiable "release of energy" to explain an assertion.
Sorry, your writing to this point has been so confused and random that I've had to strain to understand what you are trying to say. For example, when you first used the term, "non-linear" it was to refer to the curve of water vapor pressure versus temperature. Then you slid into a semantics shift to "non-linear systems". Why was I to suppose that you were now speaking of weather at that point? It's particularly annoying since the observation turns out irrelevant. Just as a small perturbation can in theory create a hurricane, so can it stop one. And the process is going to wash out with no real change in extreme weather frequency or severity. Changes in water content in atmosphere probably have relevant climate effect, but not because they are perturbing a non-linear, chaotic system.
The problem here is that global warming just isn't that threatening once you look at the current evidence in aggregate. And should it ever become more than mildly threatening, you won't need to talk about 20% higher moisture content over Boulder and other random bits of information in order to persuade others of the danger. You need to understand the evidence before you can convince others. And I think that once you have done so, you'll find better uses for your time than continuing to hyperventilate about the supposed near future dangers of global warming.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @01:02AM
I missed this comment. Sorry, that "someone" is not me. That is not my argument.