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WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Hurricane Isaias is a typical storm — but it’s also ‘astounding’
Filed 1h ago · Via Grist · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: European Parliament · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Hurricane Isaias became the Atlantic's first hurricane of the season, expected to hit the Gulf Coast as a Category 2 with surge up to seven feet, but the real story is timing: it broke the satellite-era record for latest first hurricane by about a month, per University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy. El Niño conditions in the Pacific created wind shear and dry air that suppressed storm formation across most of the Atlantic, leaving the Gulf as one of the few viable spots.
The Gulf's surface waters are running warmer than usual, fueling the storm, even though deeper ocean heat content is near record lows. Meanwhile the eastern Pacific has been unusually active, with seven hurricanes including five majors, and Hawaii has already taken hits from two separate storms this summer.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A season can run a full month behind schedule and still arrive with enough punch to flatten a coastline, which tells you El Niño and a warming ocean are pulling in opposite directions on the same rope. Nobody gets to relax just because the quiet stretch ran long, the storm that finally shows up still carries the same surge and the same wind. Weather that breaks records in both directions at once is the kind of thing a person ought to pay attention to rather than file under good luck.
