[ExI] ianic thoughts

[spike at rainier66.com]

While hiking in the Sierras this week, I spoke with my climbing companion
and discovered in him some views on storms I found must puzzling.  He
thought this was one of the worst storm seasons in American history.  It
isn't.  It is one of the mildest storm seasons in the 56 years since we have
had satellites to establish comparable metrics.

 

Note that we are approaching the end of Atlantic storm season and there is
nothing out there currently.  Julia was just named in the last hour,
currently a tropical storm.  These are the storms so far this 2022 season.

 

http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?loc=northatlantic

 

 



 

My hiking companion heard that Ian was the fifth largest hurricane to hit
the continental USA in history.  So I asked biggest how?  How biggest?
Fifth most costly?  It might end up being the most costly, but that's
different.  That doesn't make it the biggest.  It doesn't even make it to
the top of the list this mild season, depending on how it is measured.

 

By the metric which can be measured by a satellite, which has no news
stories to sell or global action to promote, Ian was the second biggest this
mild season.  By that metric, Ian doesn't show up on the top 30 hurricanes
in the past 56 years since satellites.

 

OK so not that one.  If we look at hurricanes this season by duration as a
named storm, Ian makes fourth place of nine.  If sorted by duration as a
hurricane, second of four.  If sorted by duration as a major hurricane,
second of two this season.  By total accumulated cyclone energy, second
place of nine with two others right there.

 

News agencies must sell stories which means selling exciting dangerous stuff
if they can.  So they need to find a way to make Ian sound unusually severe.
But Ian really wasn't unusually severe.  It hit right down there in the rich
kids' neighborhood, so it wrecked a lotta yachts and planes, which really is
good stuff when selling news.  It flooded a lotta nice houses, which also
sells news stories like hotcakes.  But as storms go, it was only big, not
unusual at all.  Ian was certainly expensive because of where it made
landfall and one of the very best news story salesmen in American history.

 

In some ways, the Ian story was a grand illusion.

 

spike

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