Hurricane Katrina at 10: New HD Storm Maps
As I did for Hurricane Hugo's anniversary last year I'm proud to bring to you a set of freshly-drawn, HD television quality maps from Hurricane Katrina. Ten years ago (and especially during the whopper of a hurricane season in 2005) we didn't always take the time afterwards to look back and plot out the storm's intensity. Data was harder to come by too.
When choosing maps to draw in the "AccuWeather" format, I figured we had to do the overall track map, which we had - just had to update it - but also the big hitters that describe Hurricane Katrina's intensity: Wind, Storm Surge, Rain and Tornadoes. Thanks to Jeremy and Dan here at AccuWeather for making these maps a reality. Here's the track map:
And some salient quotes:
For wind, much research has been done over the years into Katrina's wind field. There were few maps that were detailed enough to make an attractive map, and in the end I went with this H*Wind map (NOAA sold their wind modeling software to a private company, H*Wind, after Hurricane Katrina). The crazy thing about this map: These are sustained winds, not including gusts. Specifically, H*Wind tells me they are "max 1 min sustained surface winds at 10 meters - marine exposure over water and open terrain over land."
Storm surge was tough, and doesn't tell the story about the flooding in New Orleans because that was technically levee overtopping or breaching. It does, however, show the extent of the extreme damage on the Mississippi coast, which tends to be overlooked by the media who has trouble seeing past the New Orleans tragedy. The problem with storm surge is, other than point observations, you have to look at modeling to recreate what might have happened. I decided to go with this FEMA simulation, which we have redrawn here. This map shows values above 28 feet that are unconfirmed (officially, the storm surge maximum was 27.8 feet at Pass Christian, MS, with waves on top of that. Other unconfirmed reports include 33.4 feet (FEMA) and as high as 41.5 feet in Waveland, MS (Wikipedia).
Rainfall was something that you don't hear a lot about in these Anniversary look-backs. Did you know Katrina brought more than a foot of rain at both landfall points, and that more than 7 inches fell into the mountains of North Carolina and Kentucky? Fortunately, NOAA WPC has a great set of historical maps for Tropical Storm and Hurricane rainfall. Their map for Katrina goes further north and east than ours does; I didn't want to shrink ours down too much. As noted on the map, Perrine, FL racked up 16.43" from the storm; there was 14.82" at Big Branch, LA.
Another often-overlooked part of Katrina was the tornado outbreak. During the length of the storm, 60 tornadoes were reported (most, and their cities, are reflected in this graphic. Not shown on this map: tornadoes in Ohio, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, plus an EF-2 tornado in Monroe County, FL that caused $5 million in damage. There were five other EF-2 tornadoes in Mississippi and Georgia after the storm came on shore. I collected tornado info for August into a rough map that had non-Katrina tornadoes removed; original data was via the SPC and TornadoHistoryProject.com. I think our version of the map turned out to be pretty illustrative of the outbreak:
And last but not least, let's not forget Florida. Hurricane Katrina killed 14 people and caused $623 million in damage, according to WikiPedia. We had a graphic on-hand for the effects there, before we became embroiled in the Louisiana aftermath and ran out of time. Here it is, redrawn in HD in our new format:
Others have done even more amazing visualizations on the storm. Some images you might have not seen before:
Capital Weather Gang has some interesting Katrina maps I hadn't seen, including this interesting size comparison (wish it had Sandy):
The Huffington Post did an infographic comparing Superstorm Sandy (2012) with Hurricane Katrina, very interesting...
Below is a still from a visualization created by a team of researchers from the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) showing the dramatic evolution of Hurricane Katrina." There's also a related video on YouTube.
This 3-D view of the storm can be downloaded from NASA's Hurricane Katrina page:
All My Hurricane Katrina at 10 Blogs:
