Re: RMS HWind
Posted by Gianmarc on 9/19/2017, 6:51 pm
Perfectly valid concerns, Chris, and the importance of expressing the urgency faced by millions in the path of a major hurricane approaching the FL peninsula is real. At the same time, there are people in Tampa right now who think they "rode out" a Category 3 hurricane in Irma when in fact they experienced nothing of the sort there. My sister was living in Tampa when Charley struck Punta Gorda and to this day still laughs about how she "couldn't even fly a kite" in Tampa the day Charley came ashore a couple hours south of there by car. Why is this happening? Part of the problem is plain ignorance of those in the hurricane's come of error, but part of it is an abject failure by on-air mets to tell the story of the storm's impact after it has passed. WHY did they not experience the severest extent of the storm? WHY did they evacuate only to in the end realize they did so to avoid little more than tropical storm conditions? I had to have these conversations with my family post-Irma and educate them as to why it was important to evacuate and why their respective areas in Florida did not experience what was experienced in Marco Island, Key West or Naples. A big part of the problem here is the breathless obsession with irrelevant details such as the total width of a storm or the farthest reach of its wind field rather than trusting the audience to absorb a nuanced and educated discussion of the dynamics of hurricanes and the true radius of a major storm's most violent winds. The fact that a storm's total width in miles is vast is the low-hanging fruit; the fact that San Juan PR experienced no more than 55 mph sustained winds when Irma's core came within 31 miles of that city is the more difficult and my opinion, much more beneficial discussion to have.
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RMS HWind - cypresstx, 9/19/2017, 12:31 pm
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