HumidCity

I want to call out two blogger initiated relief campaigns for people suffering from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. First, the blogger Patrap who writes on a blog hosted at Weather Underground and frequently contributes in the comments on Dr. Jeff Master’s tropical weather blog, is organizing a truck of relief for Texas.

He is co-ordinating with a 501c3 so donations will be tax deductible, and working with a local blogger in the Galveston area to make sure the supplies are what is needed and get to people on the ground who need them most.

Since this is an effort coordinated by a fellow New Orleans blogger, I want to encourage the NOLA social media (bloggers and readers alike) to step up to assist Patrick in his effort.

The details are below:

Updated 4:27 pm with a new mailing address. Be sure to mark checks for Texas Hurricane Relief to ensure they are routed to Patrick’s effort.

We are coordinating a Relief Push for the Galveston area by Thursday.
We are renting a 16ft Budget truck to fill with relief supplies.
If you want to help you can contact Patrap via the Weather Underground site mail (if you have a Wunderground.com login), or you can donate cash support: Read the rest of this entry »

From Jeff Masters Blog on Weather Underground:

Tropical Storm Fay (AKA “The Joker”) is pulling a trick that may be unprecedented–significantly intensifying over land, developing a full eyewall. The radar and satellite images of Fay this afternoon (Figures 1 and 2) show a much better-organized storm than the Fay that made landfall this morning. Fay now has a symmetric appearance with a full eyewall, and the winds near the center were sustained at 60 mph this afternoon at Lake Okeechobee. These winds are higher than anything measured at landfall this morning. Remarkably, the pressure has fallen over 10 mb since landfall, and I can’t ever recall seeing such a large pressure fall while a storm was over land. Hurricane Andrew of 1992 crossed South Florida and did not weaken significantly, but “The Joker” has significantly intensified. It does happen sometimes that the increased friction over land can briefly act to intensify a hurricane vortex, but this effect is short-lived, once the storm is cut off from its oceanic moisture source. To have a storm intensify over land and maintain that increased intensity while over land for 12 hours is hard to explain. The only thing I can think is that recent rains in Florida have formed large areas of standing water that the storm is feeding off of. Fay is also probably pulling moisture from Lake Okeechobee. Anyone want to write a Ph.D. thesis on this case? Wow.

Somehow facing a storm called “The Joker” is not something I want to do after seeing Health Ledger’s stellar final performance. Holy Hurricanes Splatman, this one’s off its rocker!

-Loki, HumidCity Founder