gallopinggertie

Winter storm watch was just added by the NWS for Houston. They’re saying up to 3” of snow and sleet.

What are people’s thoughts on snow chances for New Orleans? Seems like they might be on the edge of the snow/freezing rain line but will probably at least get some snow, with a chance it’ll be one of their biggest snowfalls in history.

Typhoon Dikeledi has made it to 32 S (similar latitude to Perth or the coast of South Africa) as a tropical cyclone. It’s unusual for southern hemisphere cyclones to stay tropical so far south.

Yeah, that’s the all-time great. Weather fans here always hope for something like that…unfortunately, it might not be in reach anymore with climate change, but we’ll see. December 2008 was not to that level, but it was still pretty awesome in Seattle. A foot and a half of snow over the course of a couple weeks, and many subfreezing highs. Another standout was in Bellingham was 2016-2017, when we had a total of about twenty inches of snow and lakes froze solid enough to walk across in January. Or February 2019, with two weeks of mostly below-freezing temps followed by four days of on-and-off snow. I haven’t seen a winter I would call truly epic here yet, though. Hopefully I’m lucky enough to live through one before winters get too warm!

Yeah, the last decade has been pretty decent for this part of the country, arguably better than for normally snowier places like Washington, DC. There is a ton of geographic variation here though, so often Seattle will have a snowstorm and nothing falls in Portland, or vice versa. Also anywhere above 1000’ gets a lot more snow here, and there are a lot of interesting medium-scale geographic features that affect snowfall. Right now I’m living vicariously through the Tennessee/upper South storm.

Happy for you guys! You folks get similar snowfall averages to where I live (Portland, Oregon). So even though it’s been a snowless winter here, I’m living vicariously through this storm, which looks like the best in a long time for your part of the country.

This winter continues to be horrible for the Pacific Northwest, with little hope on the horizon. Actually, we’ve gotten pretty lucky here over the past 7 years for cold and snow. The snowfall averages here are similar to eastern cities like Raleigh or Nashville, and dud winters where it basically doesn’t snow at all tend to come every 3 or 4 years on average. A couple of my favorite winter weather events this decade were December 2022 and February 2022. In the former I lived in Bellingham, Washington. It snowed about 9 inches of powder overnight and was downright frigid for the next four days. Then we got an epic ice storm before it all melted. In February 2022 I was in Seattle and it snowed a foot! Sadly it only stuck around for a couple days. But it was pretty awesome - really deep snow is not common in the lowlands here.

This winter has been profoundly boring in Portland, Oregon. Coldest temperature of 27, zero snow or ice, hardly any wind or heavy rainstorms. Lame even by our standards.

There are reports that Chido caused extreme damage in Mayotte, with hundreds or possibly over a thousand people killed. Mayotte’s population has surged with many Comorians moving there in recent years for economic reasons, often living in shantytowns.

JRWC is forecasting it to make landfall on the N coast of Mozambique, still as a strong cyclone. Chido is slang for “cool” in Mexican Spanish.

https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-lahore-record-pollution-3bada25447094a3b1bd62d3be38b5984 Horrible air pollution is striking the city of Lahore. They opened their first Metro line in 2020, but they will have to build many more to mitigate pollution. The city already has 13 million people in the metro area and is rapidly growing.

Sounds like Rafael bit Havana pretty bad. Cuba did not need a major hurricane strike with the way that country is in full scale collapse.

Has there ever been a hurricane that strengthened to Cat 2 in the Gulf of Mexico and then weakened to a tropical depression or dissipated upon reaching the gulf coast? That seems to be what NHC is forecasting.

The wiki page on this typhoon claims that “Kong-rey was the first typhoon in Taiwan's history to make landfall after mid-October and the largest storm to strike since Typhoon Herb in 1996.” At one point, cloud cover extended all the way from the northern tip of Borneo to the very south of South Korea!

Hopefully Oscar’s tiny size prevents it from causing too many problems in Cuba. God knows they have enough going on at the moment as it is.

Does seem like it would be passing over or just to the south of Grand Turk now. Oscar’s track reminds me of Joaquin in 2015.

That’s one I’ve thought about, especially if it stalled over Miami like it did over the Bahamas. Another bad scenario would be if Andrew had made landfall 10 or 20 miles north of where it did.

I’ve seen a list on wiki of normalized costs for hurricanes, I.e. how much damage a hurricane would cause if it hit today. I’m not sure how complete it is though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Costliest_U.S._Atlantic_hurricanes_by_wealth_normalization

Oh sorry, I took it the opposite of how you meant it - my bad.

I post on a certain other regional weather forum, and some of the people there don’t even believe climate change is real. One of them said these conspiracy theories are the fault of climate scientists. Absolutely unhinged

Idiocracy.

There is definitely a lot of loss. I think we will see a final damage tally of tens of billions of dollars from this one (the first preliminary estimate I saw was 30-50 billion, though it seems too early to pin down an exact number). Whereas the worst-case scenario I’m sure would have been well north of $100 billion. It’s wild how these last-minute wobbles and timing issues have such outsize effects on people’s lives and livelihoods.

I’d suggest having more nuance, Milton wasn’t the worst case scenario but plenty of communities in florida aren’t “just fine” right now either.

The roof is made of fiberglass coated with Teflon, so I’m not sure if it’s accurate to call it fabric. Also, I’d be concerned about water damage to components of the structure as rain falls on it.

Milton is about to cross over Florida’s tallest mountain range, the mighty Lake Wales Ridge.