The 2-5 inches of rain and minor damage here seems like nothing compared to the pictures and stories coming from the Gulf Coast yesterday. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the residents who survived, who have relatives there and who are donating their time and energy to help any way they can. If the past is any sign of the future, it’s going to be along time before things are somewhat back to normal.
Historically speaking, if the experts are correct Katrina is going to rank in the top 5 in costliest hurricanes. I’ve heard the number $25 billion thrown out there…who knows how much higher that’s going to go, but here are the other four highest:
1) Great Miami Hurricane of 1926: $98 billion
2) Hurricane Andrew of 1992: $45 billion
3) Galveston Hurricane of 1900: $ 36 billion
4) North Texas Hurricane of 1915: $30.5 billion
These are normalized to 2003 dollars by inflation from the National Hurricane Center.
The website livescience.com has more on this: http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050830_katrina_effects.html
How far down the alphabet will we go? We aren’t even to the peak of the hurricane season (Sept 10th) and we’re already to the letter “K.” The record for named storms is 1995 when we saw 19 named storms (Hurricane Tanya.) http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/1995/index.html
The real record though was in 1933 when they had 21 tropical storms and hurricanes (that was before they started naming them.)
It took us 29 days this month to finally see a day with temperatures below the average…I guess it took the 2″ of rain out the airport to keep it that cool!
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/f6.htm
It will be very interesting to see how warm this August ranks, especially considering last August was one of the coolest on record. We should have the final numbers in the next few days.
Finally a great story and picture from Mars:
http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1576_1.asp
Notice the dust devil in the background!!!
