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OT: Calling bull**** on an 83 foot wave

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Boot Cane said:
“Storm of a Lifetime”... it’s a Cat 2
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The Weather Channel and network "meteorologists" are just tryin' to feed da fam.

The coverage will now change from how unprecedented a "wind event" this was going to be to how storm surge kills most hurricane victims anyway.....as this thing hits the coast at 89mph...the same speed of an Al Golden fart escaping his body after eating two whole Little Caesar's cheese pizzas in his car in a suburban Detroit mini-mall parking lot.

None of this minimizes the fact that most of this country (more importantly along the coasts) has very ****ty infrastructure when it comes to the power grids but the fear mongering in relation to these hurricanes being "wind events" has been a joke forever. EVERY one is initially billed to hit a major city at 150mph+.....until they don't.
 
Yeah. Check out the surfing off the coast of Portugal. They see bigger waves than that there.
 
Tad Footeball said:
The Weather Channel and network "meteorologists" are just tryin' to feed da fam.

The coverage will now change from how unprecedented a "wind event" this was going to be to how storm surge kills most hurricane victims anyway.....as this thing hits the coast at 89mph...the same speed of an Al Golden fart escaping his body after eating two whole Little Caesar's cheese pizzas in his car in a suburban Detroit mini-mall parking lot.

None of this minimizes the fact that most of this country (more importantly along the coasts) has very ****ty infrastructure when it comes to the power grids but the fear mongering in relation to these hurricanes being "wind events" has been a joke forever. EVERY one is initially billed to hit a major city at 150mph+.....until they don't.
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While I agree with most of that, I think they have take a worst case scenario with things like this. You sure don't want to be wrong saying it'll land as a three, but come landfall it's a five. Those are the types of ****ups that cost lives.
 
CFLCane said:
It's an NOAA bouy...they're pretty accurate.
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I'm pretty sure it didn't come from a buoy - but if it did I would be suspicious the instruments on the buoy had malfunctioned. I think what I heard the "meteorologist" on the weather channel say was that it was calculated indirectly somehow.
 
SayWhat said:
While I agree with most of that, I think they have take a worst case scenario with things like this. You sure don't want to be wrong saying it'll land as a three, but come landfall it's a five. Those are the types of ****ups that cost lives.
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Exactly what happened with Katrina
 
Tad Footeball said:
The Weather Channel and network "meteorologists" are just tryin' to feed da fam.

The coverage will now change from how unprecedented a "wind event" this was going to be to how storm surge kills most hurricane victims anyway.....as this thing hits the coast at 89mph...the same speed of an Al Golden fart escaping his body after eating two whole Little Caesar's cheese pizzas in his car in a suburban Detroit mini-mall parking lot.

None of this minimizes the fact that most of this country (more importantly along the coasts) has very ****ty infrastructure when it comes to the power grids but the fear mongering in relation to these hurricanes being "wind events" has been a joke forever. EVERY one is initially billed to hit a major city at 150mph+.....until they don't.
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Thank you .. I hate how people react to the weather channel hear in south Florida, last year it felt like the end of the world
 
Canedog said:
I dunno. I was surfing at Carolina beach and met two gUys, Bodhi and Johnny Utah catching the swells. They said it was a fifty year storm.
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I used to surf out front of the Sunskipper on the north end of CB.
 
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SayWhat said:
While I agree with most of that, I think they have take a worst case scenario with things like this. You sure don't want to be wrong saying it'll land as a three, but come landfall it's a five. Those are the types of ****ups that cost lives.
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I agree on face value with that sentiment but I think it has become problematic while remaining very profitable as ratings gold for the media outlets.

In places like Florida where we deal with these threats regularly, for every person that might be scared into acting responsibly in preparation you probably have exponentially more that just ignore warnings now based off of decades of post-Andrew storms that were billed as "historic" and "unprecedented" as Cones of Terror run 24/7 and Channel 7 has some dope standing in a puddle next to an off camera fan claiming that death is imminent. And then nothing or very little happens.

It'll never happen on a widespread level but we'd probably all be better off if we just accepted that the science regarding the forecasting of these is beyond lacking and that there is motivation to exaggerate the coverage. That's why I'm personally a big fan of John Morales' work during any South Florida storms as he's the most transparent about the limitations of the prognostications and by far the least fear-mongery.

That and be freaking cognizant if you live in a flood prone area/city. That's vastly more important than scaring Grandma in Tamarac about the possibility of her brick house blowing away in a Cat 6.
 
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The measurement referenced in OP wasn't made by a NOAA buoy, but by a satellite-based altimeter (which makes quite good elevation measurements). Notice that the wave heights in the pass in question ranged from 59 feet to 83 feet. Those might seem unbelievably large, but the wind-wave interaction at play here makes such values reasonable.

Below is an animation produced using images from the GOES geostationary satellite. Notice that the storm is cyclonic (counterclockwise rotation in the northern hemisphere). The wave measurements in question were made in the storm's northeast quadrant, where waves generated by the storm are propagating in the same direction as the local wind forcing.

Now- the 'trapping' being mentioned. Yesterday, the storm was moving at about 16 mph (a little under 7 meters per second). That's approximately the phase speed (wavelength divided by period) of a deep water ocean wave with a 4.5-second period. In simple terms, the storm is closely following the waves that it's generating, dumping enormous amounts of kinetic energy into the ocean. The 50-80 foot wave heights are representative of this confluence of factors.
 

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