Musings

No-hurry Harvey

NASA Harvey rainfall

NASA is projecting that Hurricane Harvey will be parked over this stretch of the Texas coast for a couple of days, raining, raining, and raining. This is flat land, at low elevations, especially vulnerable to that much rain…. In a few places, they predict Harvey may drop 35 inches of rain…. Whew!

Harvey potential storm surge

With elevation maps and rainfall predictions, along with storm surge/tides, NASA can merge the spatial data and map flooding potentials…. [Website visitors can zoom in far more than this….]

I suspect the calculations behind this are as complex as the eclipse models I looked at earlier this week. They’re just exclusively on this planet.

And none of this discussion is about wind effects. ☔️

UPDATE: And, just a few minutes after I posted this, I read that Harvey is now a Category 4 storm. 💨