AJC3 wrote:Gang. Be civil.
Removed? Ouch.
My "come fight me" after referencing Katrina as a 4 (at landfall, as Teban54 correctly noted) is a several-years-old internet joke, akin to "come at me, bro". The joke is meant to convey a defiant confidence in one's own appraisal, albeit in semi-jest. Sorry if this nuance caused any confusion.
I was composing a lengthy reply to Hammy's now-also-removed response, in which Hammy indicated that there was no evidence for a Cat4 landfall and proposed arguments against what's been referred to as a Cat5-level surge as being indicative of the wind strength. I fully agree that the surge is not relevant (excepting that it destroyed evidence for wind speeds), nor would it constitute part of my argument for Katrina as a 4 at landfall.
As a note about my perspective, at the time it occurred I found it entirely strange that the NHC came back around in December 2005, literally months after landfall, with the claim that Katrina was only a 3. Yes, storm information is fairly frequently tweaked in these post-season reports -- whole storms have come to be identified, after all -- but it was rather off-putting at the time.
More specifically on perspective: most recently with Ida, I caught northwestern and southwestern eyewall at a range of some 80-100 miles from the Gulf (leaving a lot of wiggle room there for the comparative haziness of the Louisiana coastline). For Katrina, I caught eastern (stronger) eyewall at a range of 70 miles north of the Mississippi coast. In my locations Katrina was, by a significant degree, the more destructive of the two, but this could be said to be the result of length of time of winds (Katrina was a big girl) and the side of the storm I was on. Ida was officially a borderline Category 2 as she passed me, and Katrina was officially a Cat1 as she passed, but even just on raw strength of winds there was no comparison . . . Katrina was significantly stronger. Even where I was for Katrina, the reports were of sustained winds of 100 miles per hour for *hours* in the heavily forested area. Officially, she passed me with winds somewhere below 95mph and gusts to 110, not losing hurricane strength for 150 miles.
Objectively, of course, Katrina was by far the larger storm, with a tremendously large windfield. The argument for Cat3 at landfall is basically that Katrina's highest winds near the eye close to landfall were at an unusually high altitude, corresponding to the HH aircraft's usual altitude, leaving rule-of-thumb estimates of surface winds too high. However, with most surface equipment rendered powerless or destroyed outright, the data simply isn't there to make the claim of a downgrade, and of course the huge and varied windfield means that Cat4-level winds could easily have existed a tad further out. The NHC made various finagling guesstimate adjustments to the data to draw the conclusion of a high Cat3, with some of those adjustments of nice round figures like 10 percent being based on the acknowledgement that they likely didn't have surface sampling of the strongest winds. I concur with that last part.
I would argue that without much firmer evidence that effectively rules out the original Cat4 designation, then the "ruling on the field" should stand. I further find it peculiar to assert that Katrina lost thirty miles per hour in a mere fifty miles inland but then only lost twenty miles per hour for the next 100 miles, especially given that higher wind speeds were felt inland at my location than would have been supported by the official speed as the eye passed. I mean, was she somehow a super-coupler of wind to surface?
Et cetera, et cetera . . . I can accept the possibility that the very center was not as strong at the surface as one would expect, but I simply don't think the evidence is there to assert this to the degree done, I don't think the tweaking and guesstimates are as well grounded as they should be, and I don't think the burden of proof is correctly applied in this case compared to how it's usually done for others.
Come figh . . . er, pleasantly discuss with . . . me.
Edit: For a similar case, see this cat's argument for a Cat4 (or less!) Camille from 2012 and compare that to the 2016 reanalysis that, even with the questionable speed cut from 190 to 175, still has her at 175mph.
https://extremeplanet.wordpress.com/201 ... gory-five/