“”Hurricane Milton wind speeds at landfall: Another case of exaggerated estimates? I went through all of the highest sustained wind speeds the Hurricane Center listed for several hours around landfall time: The average observed by stations was 67 mph, and the average of the NHC official value was 114 mph. That’s a 47 mph difference. The best positioned station was just offshore of Venice Beach, which measured 78 mph at landfall, which was 42 mph lower than the NHC estimate (120 mph). The same thing happened with Helene: our UAH storm intercept team measured only 60 mph at landfall, whereas the NHC value was 140 mph.””
- Dr. Roy Spencer
I put on my climate expert badge last night and authorized myself to survey the wind speed of the cat six and a half hurricane named uncle Milty. between making stew and checking the weather conditions along the west coast of Florida I wasn’t checking as often as I should have but let’s say maybe every 80 minutes. I was checking the wind speeds at Sarasota, Bradenton and Clearwater and the highest wind speed I found was 48. some of us read that the so-called experts said we might expect as much as a 20-foot storm surge which of course will wipe out all human life except for maybe Mark Spitz. some unnamed guy on TV last night said The surge was about 5 ft where he was. just looking at the radar you could see that the storm basically fell apart before it hit land.
I should clarify that the storm didn’t fall apart but the hurricane did. there was no eye wall at landfall that I could see, which caused the stormy weather to spread out, but without the super strong winds
I suppose it makes sense that there is so much energy in the storm. If the storm spreads over a larger area, then the energy density per unit area will have to go down. It is the concentration of energy that causes higher, damaging winds, and I imagine the high water as well. So spreading should reduce the amount of severe damage. Also, kinetic energy goes with the square of the velocity, so those reductions in wind speed substantially lowered the damage to structures. 185 to 100 wind speed, reduces the kinetic energy against a structure by 2/3ths.
It is my belief that the tornadoes accompanying the hurricane did the most local damage. I have been watching the storm from Cancun all the way to landfall and never wind was over 80mph at ground level.
It was a hype from the start.
I have never heard of EF-3 tornadoes in a hurricane. 0 & 1’s yes but a Three…NOPE. But I am only 69 so sometimes in the past Yes…
I was flipping channels last night and sometime around 11:00 Eastern Time I was watching CNN and they had a petite weather gal named Randy k. reporting from ground zero of Milton’s landfall. it didn’t even seem windy. she didn’t have to hold her cap on and the trees behind her had all their leaves on. Granted the storm did severe damage in places, maybe similar to what you would find in a cat one
I was watching when I could on Ventusky looking for the 150 mph winds which didn’t happen when the eye reached land.
The problem could be in a future storm scenario, with this policy by the media and government of ridiculous hyping of forecast wind speeds, damage, flooding etc is that in the event of a really nasty big storm, warnings will be ignored;
“Yeah look what they said last time, they’re blowin’ smoke up our ass again”
There is a reason why Kerry,Hilary,AOC and friends are going so hardcore right now with censorship.
They get 81 mio votes(and will again) the same way Milton got 150 mph.
And the narrative has to be protected.
my joke has always been if Trump gets 90 million votes then Biden will get 95 million. now we can say if Trump gets 96 million votes Harris will get 120 million.. but that’s just a joke and I’m hoping that there’s been enough reform that they can’t get away with the steal again. should be interesting if it turns out 20 million voters disappeared from 2020 to 2024. hhhmmm. where did they go?
I have pretty much the same joke.
Trump can get 335 mio votes
and kamala will still get a vote more to win the election.
But it seems they are in real trouble as the gap is so high that they have tried to assassinate him twice(which means trump survived 2 more assassinations than Kamala got votes).
Knowing that any assassination attempt drives more voters towards the victim and further exposes the deep state
they’d only try this as very last strategy(that’s why I always thought they will assassinate Joe and blame it on Trump)
Using such extreme methods twice means that you are so far behind that even manipulation can not be enough for a win.
Trump got twice as many votes from the Teamsters than Kamala
and Kamala can barely stay ahead of Trump in NY.
(they didnt need to fake the polls in NY because its a safe bet for them).
If Kamala can barely make it there
– she won’t make it anywhere(that was a cheap pun),
because then there is only a handfull of freak states left where she can win without manipulations.
Five, four, three, two, one – we have ex-hurricane Milton falling apart. At least Florida didn’t ‘tip over’ like Guam.
Sometimes I listen to student radio here in NZ to see how far off-the-edge the young indoctrinated have become: yesterday, pre-landfall, their ‘Science Reporter’ was breathlessly prophesying 10-15 foot ‘swells’ in Tampa Bay. A tidal ‘surge’ is not a ‘swell’, but hey, who needs accuracy, this is climate science!
Anyway it appears the wind was blowing offshore, from the northeast, which blew the water OUT of the bay. Settled Science™? is soooo changeable it’s nigh impossible to predict the future. All the best for soggy Floridians – no doubt the sun is shining again today.
I just heard President Bidet say that you “….must be brain dead….”, because you don’t swallow his propaganda that hurricanes are getting stronger because of Climate Change™.
People with a live brain understand the reality of natural climate variability – and the fact that storms much worse than Helene and Milton happened in the past when CO2 was at supposedly “safe” atmospheric levels.
Today’s fascists know that the yesterday’s Nazi leaders were spot on – if you repeat a lie long enough, that their sheeple will come to believe it. It is why Bidet repeats the lie as much as possible that President Trump said racists at Charlottesville were very fine people. It is so preposterous, even Cabal ‘fact checker’ Snopes debunked the whopper. Every Democrat who repeats that lie knows it is a lie.
They don’t care – their job is to repeat the lies. They keep repeating them over and over and over. Because they know their “brain dead” idiot followers will swallow every lie they tell them, hook, line and sinker.
It used to be that the grand poo-bah at the NHC (National Hurricane Center) was merely incompetent. But for the past 7 years it appears to be a deliberate attempt to fit the predictions and data to the climate cult narrative by bumping up wind speeds and hence storm category significantly.
To be fair, I recall an interview with the NHC director back in the early 2,000’s where he acknowledged that storm prediction was somewhat of a black art. The various models are rather divergent, so are not helpful, so he had to take their range, plus historical data, and then use his own judgement and sensibility to make a guess. And it’s a tricky proposition, for if you underestimate the strength and people do not prepare and encounter big losses, you are vilified. And if you over estimate and people spend tons of money preparing and evacuating and nothing happens, you are vilified.
That guess failed miserably with Wilma back in 2005. I was living in West Palm Beach (WPB) Florida, and they predicted it would weaken as it traveled across land from SW to NE, with a bullseye on WPB. Duh, the idiots did not consider that the bulk of the “land” it traversed was the Everglades, which is an inland sea of VERY warm water.
So the storm did not weaken as it passed over the glades. And they also failed to account for Wilma slamming into an approaching Cold Front right as it got to the East coast of Florida. They assumed this would weaken the storm. But again duh, weather physics 101 – a cold front causes intense thunderstorms, and indeed it amplified the eyewall squalls on the NW side of the storm.
The eye passed directly over my location, and the leading edge was strong, then the calm of the eye was indeed eerie – but all of a sudden a pitch black wall of cloud approached as the trailing eyewall came in, and the temperature dropped 30 deg F in about 20 seconds and we got slammed with an intensity that was most considerably worse than the leading eyewall. The cold front amplified the storm and spawned numerous mini tornadoes as well, one of which touched the edge of my house, and popped up and came down 3 blocks away and completely leveled a new building which was a pawn shop.
That was just incompetence in the forecast.
Here with Milton and Helene it was deliberate malfeasance to bump up wind speeds and categories by significant amounts even though actual measured data from the hurricane hunters said otherwise.
This time a cold front was impinging on Milton for a day or more before landfall, and Milton was being destroyed and experienced rapid weakening by the entrainment of cold dry air into the storm core, when it was still hours away from landfall. The circulation was broken on the south side of the eyewall, and at 4:00 PM in SE Florida, which was 195 miles from the storm center, the wind suddenly turned cool and dry, which does NOT happen with any tropical cyclone.
This ripped the storm apart, and due to the angular momentum of the squalls, sent them flying outward, and 200 miles to the NE of the storm caused almost 20 devastating tornadoes, again fueled by the approaching cold front.
The two cases are different, in Wilma, the storm collided with a cold front as it reached WPB and that impact resulted in increased storm intensity. In Milton, the cold front was pushing the storm for days, and ended up causing it to disintegrate as a tropical cyclone, with the side effect of flinging off squall bands to the NE and spawning multiple tornadoes in those squalls.
But with Milton they exaggerated the wind speed for almost the whole time it was in the Gulf, and while they said it would weaken before landfall, they still exaggerated the strength over measured data.
you came to the same conclusion that I did but with far more detail. nice job. no doubt the hurricane fell apart right before landfall
Cold front? So anti-Global Warming caused both the severity of Hellene and the diminished impact of Milton. This information must be suppressed!
lol. good one Mr Z
Thanks again for bringing these discrepancies to our attention, Tony, and for calling them out for what they are – LIES! I can’t believe how easy it is for them to lie, and how easy it is to be deceived.
I don’t know what to do about this. In medical schools, if a student is asked to do a blood gas measurement on a patient every twenty minutes, but gets lazy and just fakes one, he is thrown out of school! It’s over. We need to go back to that for more professions.
Such lies will be far more believable when AI is used in these fields. Imagine if an AI system – perhaps one operated only, or mainly, by NOAA/NASA is only trained using such fanciful data. We need the same rigour you describe regarding blood gas measurement in ALL scientific fields.
but they don’t get away with the lies. when the cat three four or five hurricane passes and all the houses are still standing and all the trees still have almost all their leaves still on, you know you’ve been BS’d.
This is a good point. The hurricane Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale (SSHWS) measurement done from satellite observation is less relevant for people on the ground, and can more easily be faked.
Compare it with the The Enhanced Fujita scale (abbreviated as EF-Scale), which rates tornado intensity based on the severity of the damage they cause. As you point out, lies about storm intensity can be more easily debunked.
Curiously, the Ventusky app consistently showed peak Milton wind speed at 10 meters above ground as roughly half or three quarters of that reported in the press. Much higher wind speeds were observed at 30,000 feet or higher but this is supposedly not where hurricane wind is measured and reported (10 meters). This was true when Milton loitered just above the Mexican peninsula for days and as it approached Florida. Ventusky claims their data comes from NOAA. It seems that NOAA’s words are not based on NOAA data. Could that possibly be true?
Here’s Dr. Spencer’s post:
https://www.facebook.com/roy.w.spencer/posts/pfbid037Z45iSt5EeLK7XymvTYKC7M4u7Bd6TzU4CN2vuMjDXxmm5kdwJsV1AJGuWZtNoVcl
DeSantis responds:
https://x.com/CurtisHouck/status/1844422985182060693?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1844422985182060693%7Ctwgr%5E2c0a940ef03f3ef217dadca22314b39607be040d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2024%2F10%2Fwatch-governor-ron-desantis-nukes-far-left-reporter%2F
What is most amusing is the hurricanes have generated a new cohort of the tinfoil hat brigade who are convinced that the storms are caused by government geo-engineering. The more the alarmists claim that weather is getting worse, the wider this particular belief is spread. The lies were bound to backfire sooner or later.
Yes, well the extreme dumbing down of society by so called education over the last 2-4 generations means both sides are awash with idiots who have no grasp of just how much energy is involved in mother nature’s normal functioning.
A 20 minute thunderstorm releases as much energy as a 20 kiloton nuke. And at any one time there are roughly 1,000 thunderstorms on planet earth. Then you have larger scale systems, like lines of thunderstorms stretching across continents, or tropical cyclones which make an individual thunderstorm look like a flea on a dog’s back by comparison. (think of just the energy stored in the rotating flywheel of air spinning around a hurricane’s eye – 200 miles in diameter by 3 miles thick, and at an average speed of say 40 mph. Calc the tonnage of air from this volume, and the angular momentum and it’s a staggering amount of mechanical energy just in the spinning wind – not to mention how much energy is involved in all the water – vapor, rain, and storm surge)
To think mankind can control or even influence this magnitude of energy release is to be dumb as a box of rocks in my view.
Actually, even countries seem to believe that there are methods of large scale weather manipulation – ENMOD .
And Ukraine has accused Russia of weather manipulations in their favor – with the typical 0 proof method.
Of course there is no method to create anything Hurricane style – otherwise they would have never let the current
Hurricane drought happen to destroy their narrative.
En contraire – we would have been bombardet into submission by a flood of Hurricanes.
As long as there is not even a hint that they can even create a micro-micro Hurricane – something like a minitornado, – which should be the lowest level needed to have something like a relevant weapon,
there is no need to waste time talking about artificial hurricanes.
They used to seed clouds to cause the rain to drop, sooner? I think it was silver iodine? Not sure how good that was in the long run.
They did it in Israel for decades.
While it was quiet promising in the beginning,
it gradually went down to zero so they stopped the experience as they tried to let the rain go down above specific regions.
But if we take the first results and project them on way more cloudy region,with huge dark clouds with a very latent tendency to rain down- especially during storms ,
I would not dismiss Ukrainians claim that Russia may have succeeded to swamp the region in their favor with a significant increase of rainfall.
Except for one Reason = Ukraine.
They always claim to shoot down 95% of all missiles(Russians ran out of 3 days after the war started).
No – if you can shoot down all missiles – a way bigger and slower plane would be shot down way before it could start seeding.
Are you trying to tell me that my furnace, which can barely heat my house on a cold winter day, isn’t responsible for heating Earth’s 321 million cubic miles of ocean water? are you sure? 🙂
Weather is chaotic in nature, which it is why it is notoriously difficult to predict, and indeed it was Lorenz’s attempts to model weather which gave rise to chaos theory. In essence this means that the system has a mixture of stable and unstable modes, all of which can transition from unstable to stable depending on the system state, the net result is a number of aperiodic oscillations. It might be possible to trigger a major event by intervening at the right time in the right place with a small amount of energy (the so-called ‘butterfly effect’) . The downside is it is impossible to predict whether such intervention will have any effect, let alone the desired effect, or to prove that the resulting effect wouldn’t have happened anyway.
Arguably, ‘climate’ is related to long term stable modes which are excited by external influences, so long term climate predictions are better spent identifying and studying them, rather than trying to find an explicit time series solution for a chaotic system, particularly when the equations contain the hogwash of the ‘greenhouse effect’.