INT: Dangerous Cyclone Sidr To Hit Bangladesh
Extremely dangerous Tropical Cyclone Sidr is making landfall in Bangladesh this evening (local time). Expect to hear of a high human toll from the flooding on the news this weekend. This news article says that hundreds of thousands have been evacuated, but the country is so poor and so flat that many will not know to evacuate, or will be unable to. The Bangladesh weather service website was not responding as of this writing.
800,000-foot clouds? Below the map, I discuss a peculiarity from the news article.
World weather expert Jim Andrews (PREMIUM | PRO) says:
The news article said that the system had "a wall of clouds about 200 kilometres tall." I'm not sure what they meant by that... by my conversions, that would be over 790,000 feet, far exceeding the troposphere where weather occurs, so I'm not sure what they meant by that. Clouds in a hurricane could reach that number divided by 10, but cloud height in a hurricane is not usually a measure of its strength.
NASA's TRMM Satellite thinks that over 10 inches of rain fell over the Indian Ocean in the last 24 hours as the storm powered towards land. A one-week accumulation image indicates 16-20" in some places.
