![]() Even though I only got to wear it once, it was $30 well spent. On the way to work, I stopped at a local mall to purchase a rain poncho. However, I was lacking one vital element, rain gear. That long anticipated opportunity had arrived. I was instructed to travel to Wrightsville Beach with photographer Rick Armstrong. Thursday morning, July 11th, I awoke to a ringing telephone. Strange, how what I perceived to be an embarrassing blunder became an important part of my story and earned me the nickname “The Caped Crusader”.Įver since college, I’ve always dreamed of reporting live from a landfalling hurricane. One image permanently embossed in the minds of many viewers is not of boats tossed around in the waves like toys, or limbs snapped off trees like toothpicks, but of a meteorologist struggling in 75 mph winds to stay fully clothed. This time, to augment our coverage, we decided to give accounts of the storm from a meteorologist’s perspective. In the past, every time a hurricane threatened life and property in North Carolina, reporters and news anchors were dispatched to the coast. Part of a team effort that set WRAL-TV 5’s compelling coverage of Hurricane Bertha’s landfall apart from our competitors. In this lesson, we're going to learn all about tropical cyclones, including the basics of tropical cyclone climatology, naming conventions, the ingredients needed for a tropical cyclone to form and strengthen, the vertical structure of a mature hurricane, and hazards associated with tropical cyclone landfalls.Hurricane Bertha – A Meteorologist’s PerspectiveĪ meteorologist reporting live from the heart of the first hurricane to strike the Cape Fear coast in over a decade. Unfortunately for those who didn't or couldn't evacuate ahead of time, by the time the storm rolled in, it was too late. In hindsight, it was an ominous foreshadowing of what was to come. This bulletin marked a watershed moment in NWS history, in that no public bulletin had ever been so explicit in describing the danger faced by those choosing not to evacuate. on Aug(24 hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall), the National Weather Service (NWS) office in New Orleans issued this chilling public bulletin which describes in graphic detail the conditions that would likely occur as the storm came ashore. Meteorologists work hard to give the public as much advance notice as possible about the dangers that hurricanes may bring, and have greatly improved the quality of hurricane forecasts in recent decades (although there's still room for improvement). It's certainly not something I recommend! And, yes, if you watched the videos, "hurricane chasing" is a real thing that a handful of (possibly crazy) people do. The ferocity that the core of a hurricane can bring is on full display in this video of Super Typhoon Haiyan (2013) making landfall in the Philippines and this video of Hurricane Katrina (2005) making landfall in Gulfport, Mississippi (this video, in particular, shows the dangers from water). Thanks to modern technology, and the ability to record and broadcast video with just a cell phone, dramatic footage from hurricane landfalls has flooded the Internet in recent years. Although very strong winds often take top headlines when a hurricane approaches land, a hurricane's most dangerous weapon is water, in the form of flooding along coasts and inland from heavy rain. There's no doubting the dangers and immense power of hurricanes and other strong tropical cyclones. This "Great Bhola Cyclone" killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people. In fact, the deadliest tropical cyclone on record occurred in 1970 in Bangladesh. These storms, which go by other names around the globe like "typhoon" or "severe cyclonic storm," roam several ocean basins and threaten countries around the world. But, hurricanes don't just impact the United States. weather disasters may be familiar to you - Katrina (2005), Harvey (2017), Maria (2017), and Sandy (2012) are just a handful of headline-making, devastating storms that have impacted the United States in recent years. The names of hurricanes that populate the top of the list of costliest U.S. weather disasters from 1980 through 2017 is dominated by hurricanes. But, such "tropical cyclones" (the generic name for intense low-pressure systems like hurricanes that form in the tropics) are quite a bit different than mid-latitude cyclones, not only meteorologically, but also in terms of impacts. But the "kings" of all low-pressure systems are hurricanes, which are strong low-pressure systems that form in the tropics or subtropics. ![]() The mid-latitude cyclones (low-pressure systems) that you learned about previously can certainly bring fierce weather, ranging from raging snowstorms to outbreaks of severe thunderstorms with damaging winds, hail, or tornadoes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |