Saturday, August 1, 2020

T-24 Hours and We're Half-Hunkered Down

We've been in and out of the hurricane's projected impact path like being in the cross hairs of a drunk holding a rifle. Currently it looks like we'll get the storm, but it won't be much of one.

So we're half-hunkered (maybe half-assed hunkered).  I haven't taken down my antennas, but we've put the shutters on the windows on the North and East sides of the house.  Those get the strongest winds in all of the hurricanes we've been through. 

Isaias will be the earliest hurricane here since Erin in 1995.  That was a category 1 hurricane that came ashore at Vero Beach, Florida, August 2nd, 1995.  Because of the path shape, we were in the strongest winds of that storm for the entire passage.  I was on a business trip for my second to last employer, the place I call Major Southeast Defense Contractor, and we had flown out on August 1st, to survey a couple of crystal oscillator vendors in the northeast.  I missed the storm entirely.  Even had a hard time coming home because the airport was shutdown. 

As of the 5PM update, the National Hurricane Center posts this forecast map.


While hard to tell at this scale, it appears to come ashore about 60 to 80 miles south of here, then ride up the coast to north of Cape Canaveral, dropping to tropical storm strength and recurving out along the eastern seaboard.   The local NOAA forecast webpage has this detailed look at our forecast weather.  Historically, this has been better than the Hurricane center at pegging the local conditions.  Winds are shown in the second horizontal plot from the top.


It says the worst of it will be Sunday afternoon from 5PM to 1AM, with continuous winds never going above 60 and gusts staying below 75.  Hurricanes are defined by continuous (one minute) winds of 75, not gusts. 

All in all, it just looks like a rainy day, a good day to stay inside.  While the power in our neighborhood has been getting flakier as it ages, there's no reason to expect to lose power.  Oops.  I shouldn't say that...



13 comments:

  1. Are you under Florida Power and Light? If so, they were supposed to modernize transmission and distribution after Andrew.

    But if it is FP&L (what PG&E could have been if the Cali government hadn't shot it in the head years ago) then, well, they call it Florida Flicker and Flash for a reason.

    Good luck.

    Hope this doesn't mess up the landing tomorrow.

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    1. I was really surprised to see them not put the return off another day or even week. I know NASA wants to get the paperwork to certify the Dragon complete, and they're probably better than the NHC at forecasting what it's going to be like.

      And, yeah, we're under FPL. We're in a neighborhood with underground utilities, and the power here has always come back very quickly when it goes out. The worst hurricane outage we've had has been two days, and I've got friends that were without power for a month.

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  2. Replies
    1. No, they're over in Orlando. The place I worked was an electronics house that put equipment on everything from bombs to satellites. We used to call them Corporation H.

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  3. The landing may be redirected to the other coast.

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  4. I hate hurricanes. One of the principle reasons I am no longer in Florida...

    I always thought Mike's Weather Page was the best source for everything... https://spaghettimodels.com/

    And while it is down to a Tropical Storm, it seems to be reorganizing.
    https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov//GOES16/ABI/SECTOR/CAR/13/GOES16-CAR-13-1000x1000.gif

    Even if NOAA and NHC keep hiding the satellite images. Or moving them around every year or 2...

    https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.php



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    1. They're such a Royal PITA. So much cleaning up to do afterwards. And that's best case.

      We go to Mike's page regularly. The problem of pages moving all the time is everywhere. That's the advantage of an aggregator like Mike's Weather Page. They keep track of stuff.

      At the moment, the local radar is almost clear and it looks very disorganized. That second graphic I posted, the wind profile, has only dropped about 10 mph, so they apparently expect it to reorganize somewhat as the day goes by.

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  5. I use
    https://earth.nullschool.net/?x=118&y=156#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/equirectangular=-80.13,27.22,3000
    for a very quick look-see

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    1. Yeah, that website (Earth) is a pretty entertaining website. I always spend far more time there than I had intended to when I go there. As of right now, the storm is nothing. We had a sprinkle around three hours ago, and it's a bit breezier than normal but that's about all.

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  6. Off topic:
    Have you been watching the MXenes:
    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.9b06394
    https://www.everythingrf.com/news/details/6904-Researchers-Develop-Spray-on-Antennas
    https://drexel.edu/now/archive/2020/July/MXene-titanium-carbonitride-EMI-shielding/

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    1. That last article is a new one on me, but I try to keep up.

      https://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2018/10/drexel-universitys-spray-on-antennas.html

      https://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2018/10/if-spray-painted-antennas-arent-your.html

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  7. Geez, I was so interested in the Crew Dragon I totally forgot you guys were in the path of a big storm.

    Hang tough and be safe, SiG!

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  8. Only scattered rainstorms here near Sarasota. I hope this fizzles for you.

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