What I don’t like about these graphics is there is no data source so you have to look it up to know how much to believe about what they say. So for those wondering, per Wikipedia:
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Helene was a Cat 4, its max diameter was between 400-450 miles, max wind speed of 140 mph is correct. Known fatalities so far > 227 and counting.
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Katrina was a Cat 5, 400 miles in diameter as shown, but with a max windspeed of 175 mph, not 125. For those too young to remember, Katrina was a very, very bad storm. So bad. Over 1392 fatalities (official estimate; exact number unknown). BTW Katrina also had a big tail/wing(?) stretching to the north when it hit land like what Helene had, but thinner since further west–but those don’t count as part of the measured diameter of the hurricane.
My opinion of this graphic: Hurricanes are getting worse because of climate change, but we don’t need to convince people of that by downplaying Katrina or making Helene look scarier–Helene is also very very bad. It’s all bad, folks.
Katrina photo:
According to wikipedia Katrina was only a cat 3 when it hit Louisiana. It did get up to a 5 at one point, but bot when it did most of it’s damage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
This infuriates me so much. I am sitting here like a dumbass saying that this storm is worse than Katrina. Like I know I should do research before being confident in what I know but how many small infographics like this do we digest and then regurgitate a political opinion based off of them
Worse is a hard metric to analyze when comparing 2 different storms. One may have higher winds. Another might dump more rain. Another might have brought a high storm surge to an area that couldn’t handle it. Another might come in kinda mild and just stall, battering one area for a long time. One storm might do massively more damage if it hits Atlanta vs. Miami. I’ll forgive people for getting a little hyperbolic when describing a storm that has personally impacted them. Storms may hit a broad region, but the impact of a storm is always hyper local.
Katrina was a man made disaster. It would not have taken a tenth of the lives it did if the levees had been maintained.
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As someone not from hurricane continent, these images are freaking scary. Like what do you mean the hurricanes are several times bigger than my entire country?
I’m just sitting here thinking holy hell I hope cyclones don’t come to my comfy corner of North-Eastern Europe
Awesome, blatanly obvious misinformation.
Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.
To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)
Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.
I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.
Helene is more deadly than Katrina if you don’t count the deaths after the boat broke the levee that was well beyond its lifespan in New Orleans, which you shouldn’t since that was a 100% fixable issue that was not taken care of.
We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.
It was definitely a man-made disaster when it came to New Orleans. I made this analogy to someone else: if lightning strikes a skyscraper and the skyscraper burns down and kills everyone inside due to a lack of a sprinkler system, is that really death by a natural cause? I would say it’s death by gross incompetence.
We don’t respect rivers enough. I would never live in a floodplain.
The real problem with “never live on a floodplain” is that you can’t know where the floodplains are. The flood maps are all based on historical rainfall data, and that data is now obsolete. Even worse, it won’t stabilize in our lifetimes. So we can’t just observe the next ten years of rainfall and plan around that. No, things are changing, and they will continue to change. You might think you don’t live on a 500 year floodplain. But the cold truth of it is, we no longer have any idea where the 500 year flood plains are anymore. You need decades of weather observations of a stable climate to come up with accurate flood maps. And we just don’t have that kind of reliable data anymore. Unless you happen to live on the top of a very tall hill, you really can’t be sure you don’t live in a flood zone of some sort or another.
Are these pictures even on the same zoom level?
You are correct, they don’t appear to be. This one seems more accurate there, but the difference is still stark:
I did one too. Top and bottom before I saw yours. Here it is as well to help with the scale. I overlaid them in Photoshop to help get the land the same but hell its nuts.
I was going to correct you on the comparison and I tried making my own scaled image … but I couldn’t because yours is a correct scale
I just couldn’t believe that Helene was that massive and widespread compared to Katrina which was known as a major event. wow
They are not, but I think the main focus is on how obscenely tall Helene was. There’s many parts of the US that weren’t prepared because they didn’t think it would reach them
Wasn’t a big part of Katrina’s destruction from the hurricane effectively stalling over the southern US which caused prolonged and massive local damage?
Not trying to discount either event, mostly worried about the time we get a stalled Helene sized hurricane
A stalled hurricane doesn’t have to be large. Fran is an example back in history, and Harvey in more recent. But stalled storms also has its origin from climate change, because the weather steering systems are broken and cause/allow it.
We even got some excessive wind in Chicagoland, which was obviously from the hurricane, because it was coming from the east. Normally, the wind here comes from the west.
Reminds me of youtuber LGR’s latest video, he didn’t prepare much because the storms don’t normally reach that far inland, and unfortunately he had a lot of his collection damaged because 2 massive trees sliced his house clean in half. Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
We have our own shit show of extreme weather. For example, derechos (an oceanless, inland hurricane essentially) used to be rare. We’ve had 2 massive ones in the last 4 years. This summer alone there were hundreds of tornados hitting places that rarely ever see them. Hell, it’s god damn October and we’re still having ~90°F days, which hardly ever used to happen.
We got one of those out of place tornadoes this year! My town had one set down basically in the middle. We lost so many huge old (50-150+ year old) trees because that just doesn’t happen here. And because it doesn’t happen here, and some of the trees were planted well before the roads were built (meaning a lot of the trees that came down were basically in the road, curbs built around them sort of thing), it really did a number on the infrastructure (to say nothing of the damage to homes and stuff).
But in addition to a random tornado, we’ve just had a ton more super strong wind/rain events that cause damage in the last few years. I honestly don’t blame my neighbors for taking down their big old trees rather than deal with the weather damage. (I disagree with it, but I understand it)
Are you in Tennessee? Because that sounds like the last four years here.
Not super far from there (~6 hours), WNW Illinois.
The next storm?
Is that a real image?
Hate how people are downvoting this guy just for asking a question, like what is this, reddit?
I wouldn’t worry about it. There’s a very sad person who tries to downvote all of my posts on a regular basis.
I call that the validation downvote. Just means the federation is still working.
I think they’re downvoting the Squid, not the content of the post. I imagine a poster like Flying Squid has made some enemies along the way, the kind of people who literally go and downvote all their posts.
I’ll take what I said on Reddit and bring it here: Don’t comment on downvotes, they don’t matter.
It’s a real screenshot from 2004’s banger The Day After Tomorrow.
Geostorm. Fun enough throwaway Gerard Butler movie.
I feel like those words could be used to describe most of his movies (though obviously some are better than others, I’d even go so far as call a couple of them pretty good)
Why would a satellite actually imaging storms want to place a satellite in the image as well?
I think its from some movie, like “the Day after Tomorrow” or something.
Because in movies you can have a shot of a satellite while showing a shot of the storm. I think that’s fairly harder to do in real life, seeing you’d have to have two satellites perfectly in sync (and they go pretty fast) or a satellite (space stations are satellites as well) with a very long selfie stick.
Edit actually yah googled “the day after tomorrow storm” and this was one of the first images to pop up, the exact same image https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/scale_862/public/2022/12/storm.jpg
I’ve seen ISS photos that have bits of the ISS in the shot. 🤷♂️
But also, I did some searching and no, that is not Hurricane Milton.
Wimdy.
But the least wimdy going forward.
We gonna achieve such terrifying new records in just years!As with everything, it also matters where it hits.
Katrina and New Orleans’s levees was a big deal. Helene flooding areas many moles from the coast in high altitude areas.
There have been bigger hurricanes that do less damage and likely there will be future weaker ones that do more.
I too worry about the poor moles getting flooded!!
I remember when conservatives were hooting and hollering about Climate Science Being Wrong, because the predicted “Worst hurricane season on record” wasn’t producing a record number of powerful storms.
Well… now what? I guess we can fall back to Gaetz and DeSantis blaming Biden for a bad cleanup job. Or go the MTG approach and start talking about HARP and the Jewish Space Lasers.
Didn’t you know those space lasers heated up the atmosphere just over Republican counties, to maximize the damage there?
I would simply not live in a majority GOP county. Seems like they were victims of a personal choice.
Eventually there won’t be any insurer’s left in those areas and most people will just abandon them. Of course the federal government will keep giving them flood insurance to rebuild over and over.
oh hey, all those east coasters can sell their worthless flooded houses to the west coast coasters selling their worthless burnt down houses fleeing the fires since no insurers will cover anywhere.
Then those people living along the Mississippi can sell their worthless houses to the people from new Orleans. It’s foolproof.
Aquaman: “On second thought I’ll fix climate change AFTER a few purchases.”
I’ll take “Republican states fucking themselves by defunding their own subsidies” for 500, Trebek.
Evidently they fucked themselves by voting against Gore, too.
I mean sometimes that shoe just fits. It’s the damnedest thing.
Maybe Florida voted majority against gore, we will likely never know
Oh, we know.
Good news! It’s gonna get worse! Much, much worse! Say thank you to petrol states and companies, preferably by blowing up their infrastructure
And a big thank you to politicians blocking major efforts to reduce carbon emissions thanks to lobbying by the industry and foreign governments.
The world finally needs to stop politicans getting huge donations and hold them accountable for their actions.
It boils my blood that Republicans would blame Democrats for not sending enough aide during these times, all the while Republicans vote against initiatives drafted up by Democrats to combat these issues specifically.
They use issues like this entirely to rouse their base and keep their support.
Not sure what the science is between 2 images with no source or timestamp and nearly 20 years of technological improvement between them is but this isn’t the peak of Katrina
Katrina ultimately reached its peak strength as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale on August 28. Its maximum sustained winds reached 175 mph (280 km/h) and its pressure fell to 902 mbar (hPa; 26.63 inHg), ranking it among the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.
It probably refers to its stats at landfall
Katrina weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall along the northern Gulf Coast, first in southeast Louisiana (sustained winds: 125mph) and then made landfall once more along the Mississippi Gulf Coast (sustained winds: 120mph). Katrina finally weakened below hurricane intensity late on August 29th over east central Mississippi.
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
[Katrina] is the costliest hurricane to ever hit the United States, surpassing the record previously held by Hurricane Andrew from 1992. In addition, Katrina is one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorological_history_of_Hurricane_Katrina
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
Only if you count what happened in New Orleans after the storm, which was an infrastructure issue, not a weather issue.
You’re splitting hairs.
No I am not. Those deaths were not the result of a natural disaster. The levee break was both predicted for years and preventable if the funds were just spent on it. Those deaths were directly the result of government incompetence.
So are you not going to count deaths from Helene resulting from people not evacuating properly? For not taking it seriously because it was preventable?
Where will poor people go and how would they afford to go and how would they get there?
It’s the same for either hurricane
this can’t be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
This is like me comparing the joplin tornado to the el reno tornado.
(for those that don’t know the joplin tornado was an extremely erratic EF/F 5 tornado that was incredibly strong and just sort of showed up and then lingered over a particular area causing immense destruction, whereas el reno was a massive, very powerful tornado, that was collectively rated to be about an EF/F 3 i believe, although the core itself, and numerous shenanigans it pulled including sub vorticies or whatever the correct term is were much stronger, causing strong localized damage)
The different categories are the point. What they’re missing though is Helene was much closer to a category 5. It’s winds were 15 mph short of that category and the storm tail you can see in the above photo is characteristic of category 5 Hurricanes. That in and of itself isn’t a big deal. The big deal is that it’s the second storm at this strength this year. The first one stayed coastal where they’re used to all that rain.
What the picture is basically saying is Katrina was a warning shot. An actual Category 5 with winds well past 157 mph is going to hit the wrong spot and we’re all going to regret not taking climate change seriously.
going to
I don’t unpack my go bag anymore even though we only evacuate every sixth year or so. I’ve lived here 30 years and we’ve evacuated 4 times, will probably need to this year or next (fire season is almost over). Although, I’m calculating like it happens steadily, not taking into account the acceleration. 1996. 2007. 2017. 2020. uh, fuck. Now that I type that out, those last two are an awful “coincidence” and I need to go sit down.
Oof yeah. That wasn’t why we left the fire prone area we used to live in, but it sure didn’t hurt the decision to move.
Well, it’s not over.
This is coming next week. Path is unclear, and its not as big as Helene, but anything near a 930mb in Tampa Bay and plowing over Orlando at 950mb, especially at this angle, is a catastrophe.
Katrina was 920mb at landfall, and these intensity forecasts have been undershooting hurricanes recently.
And there’s another low pressure system at the edge of the GFS that I don’t like, taking a similar path to Helene:
This is what the upcoming hurricane looked like a few days ago.
It’s clearly trying to help the US by amputating the injured limb.
Are those images the same scale?
Not quite, the Helene one is between 25% and 50% more zoomed in based on what I can see of the bump of Louisiana and the shape of Cuba. Still a striking comparison even with that accounted for.
Edit: Oh wait, I misread the uncovered coast line on Cuba. I think that’s actually closer than I initially thought. They just have it panned and rotated a little.
