Updating

It's an odd week in that real space news seems hard to find, the stories are preliminary news about potential contracts or programs, so nothing we'll see for a while. So since the news I'm seeing is wrapped around the coming Hurricane Milton and the recovery operations ongoing after Hurricane Helene up in the SE stretching from Georgia and the Florida panhandle up to Tennessee and Virginia, that has sucked up a lot of my time and attention. 

A starting point is that I still swap emails from time to time with a former office mate I've known since we worked on hardware for the space station in the early 1990s. He's a fellow RF engineer who grew up in Tennessee and went to college there. As news started coming out of NC, he sent me this photograph from one of the local papers up there. In the distance, what I take to be flood waters can be seen.  It's a landmark sign about the Flood of 1916, apparently knocked down by something, presumably Hurricane Helene itself. 

It's hard not to notice it's just over 100 years ago, and while most places keep track of "hundred year floods," it takes some determined research to find out lots about it. Was the catastrophic flood of 1916 worse than this year's flood?  Or was this year's worse?  Are they really spaced around a hundred years from each other? 

It's so common that it's a cliche' that every change in weather, every bad day, whether cold or hot, dry or flooded, gets blamed on "climate change."  It isn't surprising or unexpected, then, that Watts Up With That, one of the most authoritative counterpoints to blaming everything on anthropogenic climate change, would run an article on this 1916 Flood, which also happens to have been caused by a hurricane. Interestingly, every place named on that sign is named in that article linked to on WUWT.

The 1916 Major Hurricane Asheville culprit is Number 4 on the list at a time when names were not given to hurricanes and there were no satellites, hurricane hunter aircraft or long-range weather radar systems available to identify and track storms.  

There were 15 numbered Atlantic storms in 1916 even though there easily could have been many more that were never observed during this season because of observation inadequacies compared to today’s available technology.

The year of 1916 had more numbered storms at 15 than we've had named storms (Milton is number 13), and that big disclaimer saying there could have been more storms, or even many more storms than we have had is quite important, as hurricane season starts to wind down. Back in 1916, if a storm stayed out of shipping lanes, or wasn't active in them when ships were there, it's far more likely it could live out its life without being known about than today.  With our satellites and other ways of knowing they're out there, that's pretty much impossible today. 

A measure of the activity of a hurricane season is accumulated cyclone energy, ACE, a product of the strength of a storm and how long it exists.  The 1916 Atlantic season had a total ACE of 144 compared to the 2024 season total 115.6 as of October 7, 2024.  The Atlantic Season 30-year ACE average (1991 – 2020) is 122.5 so the year 1916 was an above average ACE hurricane year, and 2024 is still below average. Hurricane season runs until the end of November so there's close to two months left. While early predictions were for a very active season, it hasn't been. Even with Milton - so far.

The number of storms through the Atlantic hurricane season, showing the peak on September 10th, and a "You Are Here" box around October 10th, or so. Just to show that while we're well past the peak, we're nowhere near as inactive as through August 1st, or from mid-November until December 1. 

If you haven't seen it, yes, Helene and Milton both have been blamed on climate change.  It's a different subset of people than the ones blaming it on weather modification or malicious forces trying to buy up all the land so they can mine the shi..er.. mine the lithium out of it.  In both cases the basic idea seems to be, "it seems abnormal to me, so it must be this instead of just plain weather" - where "this" is climate change, cloud seeding, Black Rock, the military, or whatever.