Sunday, August 9, 2009

Morakot effects and other tropical news

PubTeX output 2006.02.15:1804

Taipower restoration work keeps on being impressive.Although Morakot has already produced 1.5 Million outages, Taipower seems to have managed to maintain the active outage number at about 10 % (more precisely about 160,000) of the total outages occurred since the storm began. These are impressive figures which worth a more detailed view in the future. The Pacific is boiling with storms, depressions, and invests, with 3 in the west (including Morakot) and 2 in the east (including Felicia). Regarding Felicia, although it has entered into cooler waters which made her loose some intensity, she has been holding its structure quite well which seems to indicate that may reach Hawaii with still some intensity. Let's see what happens.

As with all El Niño years, the Atlantic is relatively calm. A very impressive tropical wave left Africa a few hours ago and may well become Ana, the first named storm of the season. It is interesting how sea temperatures in the Pacific (El Niño is a temporary increase of east equatorial Pacific waters) can influence the Atlantic hurricane seasons so much. The most intense El Niño occurred in 1997 when only 8 storms, 3 of them hurricanes, formed. One of these hurricanes, Danny, was the only storm that made landfall in the U.S. When it made landfall, Danny was a weak Cat. 1 hurricane, however, I received comments that in terms of power issues Danny was the most challenging storm after Katrina. The reason is that as soon as it made landfall Danny stalled and prevented with heavy and continuous rains conducting damage assessments and network restoration activities. But, of course, El Niño years is not a guarantee of mild quiet seasons. The following year, 1998, was also a strong El Niño, but strong storms (Bonnie, Georges, and Mitch) affected the US and Central America.

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