Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog

Quoting Stormchaser2007:
RAP has a very sharp wind shift near Cozumel now.

Quoting TropicalAnalystwx13:

You've got that mixed up lol.

Quoting MAweatherboy1:
I don't see why recon would go today... There's no way 96L is a TD yet, a mission now would be a total waste... They should send out recon tomorrow when organization should be better.

Quoting seriousman1:


i have to disagree man right now and before recon flies into sooned to be debby texas has this over florida...florida is gaining no ground on texas...so texas like 60% la miss and alabama 30 % and florida 10%..

Quoting Stormchaser2007:


FULL

Quoting Stormchaser2007:
In my opinion, recon will be scrubbed for today.

96L is poorly organized, *****with possible multiple surface centers****** and very poorly organized convection. It will need some serious time to get it's act back together.

Quoting hydrus:
I still see a couple of low centers in there. Some people here knew this would happen over a week ago.

Quoting Stormchaser2007:


FULL
That looks much better. Very cold cloud tops.

Quoting Patrap:

Quoting Stormchaser2007:
RECON CANCELLED:

3. REMARK: LOW LEVEL INVEST FOR 22/1800Z CANCELED
BY NHC AT 22/1230Z.

Quoting Patrap:
3. REMARK: LOW LEVEL INVEST FOR 22/1800Z CANCELED
BY NHC AT 22/1230Z.

Quoting Stormchaser2007:


FULL

Quoting Articuno:

So whats this mean?

Quoting Stormchaser2007:
RECON CANCELLED:

3. REMARK: LOW LEVEL INVEST FOR 22/1800Z CANCELED
BY NHC AT 22/1230Z.

Quoting TampaFLUSA:

In the short term I don't see this developing.

Quoting Articuno:

So whats this mean?

Quoting StormTracker2K:
First baby!

Quoting hydrus:
Looks like at least one of the low centers is meandering over the northern tip of the Yucatan. There is a weaker low north of the western tip of Cuba...Hard to see here..P.S. There may be high pressure trying to build over this thing.

Quoting seriousman1:


great post i agree this should not be happening..florida is not in the mix anyway...

Quoting stormpetrol:
Will be an interesting mission for HHs today I think.

Quoting Stoopid1:


How do you figure? All of the Gulf Coast is a possibility, and most models show 96 on a path toward Central Florida at the moment.

Quoting wpb:
a reformation to the east in the heavy rain and ts would kickstart development

Quoting pensacolastorm:


Yep. If Santore is on your beach you are safe. Storms seem to hit the other TWC guys.

Quoting Jeff9631:


Heard you live in CFL too? I'm thinking the models will shift towards the CFL solution as well, we shall see.
Im in C Fl (Pasco County, Wesley Chapel Fl)

Quoting Patrap:
We're a lot better protected after the almost 7 years of Structure, and High Profile improvements to the Levee Protection System.

Hopefully it will 40 years between majors as it was for Betsy and K.

Vast Defenses Now Shielding New Orleans

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: June 14, 2012


Construction last month on the Seabrook floodgate complex in New Orleans. The overall defense system includes the biggest pumping station on the planet.

NEW ORLEANS %u2014 Finally, there is a wall around this city.

Nearly seven years after flood waters from Hurricane Katrina gushed over New Orleans, $14.5 billion worth of civil works designed to block such surges is now in place a 133-mile chain of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps too vast to take in at once, except perhaps from space.

Individual components of the system can be appreciated from a less celestial elevation. At the new Seabrook floodgate complex, climb up three steep ladders, open a trap door, and step out into the blazing sunlight atop a 54-foot tower that was not here just two years ago. From there one looks out over a $165 million barrier across the shipping canal that links Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.

Two lift gates, 50 feet across, can be lowered to block the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. A navigation gate 95 feet wide, whose curved sides weigh 220 tons apiece, can be swung gently but mightily into place. When open which will be most of the time the gates will allow easy boat traffic.

When a storm threatens, however, they will seal off the canal from the kind of surge that devastated the Lower Ninth Ward in Katrina.

Yet all that seems puny in comparison to the two-mile Great Wall that can seal off the channel from Lake Borgne to the east, or the billion-dollar west closure complex, which features the biggest pumping station on the planet.

Now, hurricane season has returned, as it does each June. Whatever storms might approach New Orleans this year or in the future, they will encounter a vastly upgraded ring of protection. The question is whether it will be enough.

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city's hurricane protection system became a symbol of America's haphazard approach to critical infrastructure. The patchwork of walls and levees built over the course of 40 years was still far from complete when the storm came, and even the Army Corps of Engineers admitted that this was a system in name only. Flood walls collapsed, and earthen levees built from sandy, dredged soils melted away.

What has emerged since could come to symbolize the opposite: a vast civil works project that gives every appearance of strength and permanence. No other American city has anything like it. This is the best system the greater New Orleans area has ever had said Col. Edward R. Fleming, the commander of the New Orleans district of the corps.

Marc Walraven, a district head in the Dutch ministry of transport, public works and water management, recently toured the defenses. While 100 percent safety is impossible, he said, and challenges in operations and maintenance can be expected as the corps passes the facilities over to local management in the coming year, the constructions that have been built are in my opinion adequate to defend New Orleans.

Tim Doody, the president of the levee board that oversees Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes, disagrees. While the construction appears to be strong, he said, the level of protection authorized by Congress for the corps to build is woefully inadequate.

The new system was designed and constructed to provide what is informally known as 100-year protection, which means it was built to prevent the kind of flooding that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. That standard is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine whether homeowners and businesses must buy flood insurance to qualify for federally regulated or insured mortgages.

But New Orleans has seen storms far more damaging than the 100-year standard. Katrina is generally considered to have been a 400-year storm, and rising seas and more numerous hurricanes predicted in many climate-change models suggest harsher conditions to come.

It's what the country will pay for; it's what FEMA insures for,%u201D Mr. Doody said. But our thought and belief is that we all need to be behind protection thats greater than that.

Still, corps officials insist, the new system has been designed with far greater strength and resiliency than anything that went before it. While a major storm could lead to street flooding something New Orleans, much of which is below sea level, sees even with heavy rainfall the kind of catastrophic, explosive wall of water resulting from the failure of sections of flood wall and the dissolution of poorly-built levees that devastated so much of the city after Katrina should not occur again, they say.

Quoting STXHurricanes2012:
96L is relocoating near Cozemel!

Quoting txcoastgirl:
New to this site...very interesting!