HURRICANE HARVEY, WHICH killed 60 people and may end up costing $150 billion, parked over Houston and dumped four feet of rain. The water overwhelmed the sprawling city’s flood control systems. Meteorologists and atmospheric scientists used up their superlatives describing the storm’s size and impact.
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| Traffic in the Florida Keys before Hurricane Irma hits near Homestead, Florida, on September 6, 2017. |
They should have saved some.
Hurricane Irma has become the most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale—over 800 miles wide, roughly the size of Texas, sustained winds of over 185 miles per hour for more than 24 hours, gusts over 200 mph—and it has made landfall in the Caribbean. Irma’s storm track, the predicted line of its travel, projects its eye gliding north of the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba starting Thursday, zooming up Florida to Miami late Sunday, and then reaching Georgia and South Carolina the next day.
All hurricanes have a theoretical maximum intensity, a thermodynamic limit on how fast their winds can blow given ocean temperature and atmospheric temperature. Few hurricanes ever actually reach that limit. But as Irma grew and developed, it came very, very close. If Harvey was a perfect storm, Irma is an almost impossible one. “Irma is anomalous,” says Jim Kossin, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “This is a record-breaker. Unprecedented. Catastrophic.”
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