Everybody’s been following the travels of Hurricane Ike for the past few days. Labeled early on as a “killer” storm, primarily because of its huge size and the path that takes it through some highly populated areas, this one will certainly leave a lot of damage in its wake. I’m keeping an ear on the Weather Channel while I write this and it sounds like Houston is really taking a battering right now with some wind gusts over 90 mph.
One of the things that was really impressive about this storm is the size of it. That thing is huge. Looking at the satellite images on Thursday you could see that it just about filled the entire Gulf of Mexico. The weather service said that it covered 85% of the Gulf when it was directly over it. That’s a mighty big area.
Another thing that caught my attention is the expected speed and direction of the storm center’s travel from here on out. Looking at NOAA’s tracking chart you can see that after it will start bearing NE and after it spends most of today wandering up into Oklahoma, it will suddenly take off like a race horse and sail all the way up to Lake Erie within a 24-hour span, reaching Canada around 1 am on Monday.
[photopress:ike_track_sat.gif,full,centered]
Natually, those severe winds will be expended by tomorrow morning, but those folks along the path are sure going to see a lot of rainfall during the brief time that the system flies over them. I can certainly empathize with them. About once every 20 years we get one of those things traveling over us and it is no picnic in the park.
Well, we’d better get the equipment checked out. I’ll make sure there’s plenty of coffee because I’m sure we’ll all be watching the storm reports on the tv for a while this morning. And don’t forget that Firegeezer.com has the Hurricane Watch page (click on the top of the page header) where you can see the current satellite images for the North Atlantic storms.
Recent Comments