Trying to make sense of why Otis exploded en route to Acapulco
theeyewall.com
theeyewall.com
Would love to see followup on this. Wish there were some way to like bookmark or something and come back in a few years.
tldr: garbage data into the model, garbage out.
Detailed summary from interview: • only 1 hurricane hunter flight was done into this storm. • mexican hurricanes just don’t get as much reporting coverage (historically). For example for atlantic hurricanes, NOAA hurricane hunter airplanes have tail doppler radar, which provides good data to feed into the model. • without detailed doppler radar, they had to fallback to satellite measurements. • Mexico doesn’t have ground based radar coverage at all, like the US coast does.
https://chat.openai.com/share/9448215d-2b65-4611-a634-f1a900...
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindm...
Or put it on your calendar with an email alert ;)
E.g. the wind sheer exactly right, a patch of warm water, etc.
That does seem really tricky to model without making the models overly jumpy.
Isn't this the expected behavior once it made landfall?
I found this analysis more comprehensive https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/10/nightmare-scenari...
We're working on this problem at Care Weather (www.careweather.com). Current wind sensing satellites only measure ocean surface winds once per day. They're too expensive for governments to build additional satellites for more frequent refresh. We're lowering their cost by three orders of magnitude and launching a constellation to get hourly updates.
edit: wow, that was some unexpected downvotes
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/trying-to-make-sense...
Can anyone recommend a good one-click firefox extension to open an archive copy of the current page?
I'm using it on my phone. It gave me this https://archive.ph/20231026233758/https://theeyewall.com/try... with a few taps.
Even if the site was down for everyone I would comment. Lots of people comment about “hug of death”, for example, and I find it very useful. I know it is not me and I can find an alternative.
And since it’s not down for everyone, only a few, for a new, odd, technical reason, I find it even more relevant to comment about it.
Just like it is useful when people comment when a site is not accessible from a certain country, like BBC sometimes or some YouTube video.
I see these comments often on HN and I always find them useful. They also usually are among the top comments, so likely not downvoted.
That said, I was premature in editing the comment to show my surprise in being downvoting. That, indeed, is against HN etiquete and also it was just some temporary state, since I got many more upvoted since then.
But from time to time we get an event like this, and it really underscores how little we really know. The sheer complexity of the phenomena / the theory we use to contain and understand them, it just seems to misfire spectacularly on occasion.
In a fantasy world, I would like to see weather forecasts that reach several months out, with high reliability. Mapping winds, precipitation, etc, with high spatial and temporal accuracy.
Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding what you're saying but when it says "30% chance" what it is actually saying is "there's a 100% chance of rain in 30% of the coverage area".
Not sure if that makes it more or less accurate.
If all papers, books and newspaper gradually go digital, just electric charges or magnetic blips in racks - few thousand years down the road our civilization would be virtually traceless or at least those parts of it.
Nothing is forever. Just a random thought.
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https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2023/ep18/ep182023.discus.0...
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM
Hurricane Otis Discussion Number 10 NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL EP182023 400 PM CDT Tue Oct 24 2023
Otis has undergone very rapid intensification today. An eye became apparent on visible satellite images only a few hours ago, embedded in very deep convection. An Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft penetrated the eye around 1900 UTC and again around 2000 UTC, and found that the maximum sustained winds had increased to near 110 kt over a very small area near the center, while the central pressure remarkably dropped around 10 mb from the first to the second center fix. The intensity of Otis is well above the Dvorak satellite estimates, and again underscores the value of aerial reconnaissance in monitoring hurricanes.
Otis should remain in an atmospheric and oceanic environment that will be conducive for further strengthening later today and tonight. Vertical wind shear should not be too strong, with SSTs near 30 deg C. Based on the observed changes, the short-term official intensity forecast remains above the model guidance. The system is now forecast to be at extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane status by the time it reaches the coast of southern Mexico late tonight or tomorrow morning. After landfall, the system should weaken rapidly over the mountainous terrain of Mexico.
The hurricane continues on about the same heading, or around 330/7 kt. For the next couple of days, Otis should move between a mid-level ridge to the east and northeast and a trough to its northwest. The official track forecast is about the same as the previous one and is a little faster than the dynamical consensus. On this track, the center of the hurricane will make landfall within the hurricane warning area late tonight or early Wednesday.
Anybody who understands what the big words 'climate change' mean, could have predicted this. HAVE predicted this. I personally have predicted this and I'm not even a weather forecaster, I just know what chaos theory is.
Adding energy to the system produces a wider range of possible outcomes. This is absolutely one of the possible outcomes.
A few degrees less warming and it might not have been possible.
Chaos is STRANGE. It's sensitive to initial conditions. One of those conditions is the total energy in the system. This is what happens when you add a few degrees to the whole planet. It'll act normal, sort of, maybe for quite a while… then bam.
Because this is what you get when you add energy to a chaotic system the size of a planet, and it will happen again. We just got a picture of the new range of possible event… or of something WITHIN the new range of possible event, which by no means is guaranteed to be the most dramatic climate outcome currently possible.
This was probably on the high end of possible events but might not even be the most extreme thing that can now happen with this level of climate energy.
Climate energy is still increasing.
I'm shocked myself by the degree of devastation, and suspect the reported death toll is low. Some of the damage can be ascribed to corruption and lax building codes, But the sight of multiple recently constructed high rise buildings completely trashed has to be sending a cold chill down the spines of insurers and emergency planners.
As COVID-19 showed us, humans aren't great at dealing with delayed effects.
We’re currently approaching the regional disasters stage.
They thought we’d hit 2.5C warming by either 2038 or 2025, which will be enough to halt global economic growth. We seem to be on the 2038 curve.
That curve has us hitting 5C by 2069, with globally catastrophic impacts.
The document I’m referring to is here:
https://download.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/g/f/f/l/gffl0228...
It is a set of AQ-9 climate task force minutes. In the end, they conclude:
——
AT A 3% PER ANNUM GROWTH RATE OF C02, A 2.5°C RISE BRINGS 2 WORLD ECONOMIC GROWTH TO A HALT IN ABOUT 2025.
Even If this estimate is grossly wrong it Is still probable that
• WHETHER THERE ARE GROUNDS FOR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE TO THE THREAT DEPENDS ON THE VALIDITY OF THE LONG MARKET PENETRATION TIME CONCEPT.
• EVEN IF THE LATTER IS APPLICABLE, PRESENT DAY SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IMPACT DEPENDS STRONGLY ON CHOICE OF A FUTURE DISCOUNTING FACTOR.
• NEED FOR IMMEDIATE POLICY ACTION HINGES ON THESE LAST TWO FEATURES.
—-
The document also says that back in 1980, there was no leeway to wait to take action to mitigate climate change. Instead, they ended up spending unprecedented amounts of money on disinformation campaigns and in support of climate change denying politicians in the 1990s and afterwards to prevent action from being taken.
I guess their discount factor valued their grandchildren at ~ $0.
The author certainly knows about climate change and the intensification of events due to warmer seas, landmasses and air.
This article is about a particular storm and how models failed to predict the outcome.
Best estimates I've found to date: [ EDIT: 0.6-0.8 ] * Petawatts * of extra energy circulating in the atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic changes to radiative forcing.
EDIT: For the people downvoting this because "watts are units of power not energy", please read the Wikipedia page on radiative forcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
For the people downvoting because they can't believe the number, here's where i took the value from: https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-ener... ... I did quote it incorrectly, by 1 order of magnitude (out of 16!)
For the people who still argue with the use of watts, despite that being a standard for this, here's the author of the above link on this point:
> Note: Before anyone complains, I’ve deliberately conflated energy and power above, because the difference doesn’t really matter for my main point. Power is work per unit of time, and is measured in watts; Energy is better expressed in joules, calories, or kilowatt hours (kWh). To be technically correct, I should say that the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour. The ratio is still approximately 18.
Out of interest, you can also convert it to calories. 1kWh is about 0.8 million calories. So, we’re force-feeding the earth about 2 x 1017 (200,000,000,000,000,000) calories every hour. Yikes.
[0] technically some layer of the earth between the ground and whatever you define as the edge of the atmosphere.
A Watt is a joule of energy transferred over one second, i.e. they're a rate.
Thank you for a new term to research :)
What is that as a percentage of total energy circulating? The number by itself is meaningless - the Earth is large, it has a lot of energy, that's not news.
Taking my main source's figure for the number of calories per hour that we're adding (2x10^17 calories aka 4x10^17 joules), that suggests that we are causing enough extra heat to be retained to raise the atmospheric temperature 1C every 9000 hours or roughly every year.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/16c167g/req...
As for "1 order of magnitude (out of 16!)", the "out of 16" is meaningless - the number 16 is merely a consequence of the arbitrary choice of unit size. Your original figure was simply off by a factor of ten, in any units.
I found these facts in the article interesting:
- This is not actually unprecedented -- hurricane Patricia in 2015 did the same thing, more intensely.
- "Sea surface temperatures were close to 31°C over Otis’s path, which is a few degrees above normal. While not the primary cause of Otis’s rapid intensification, they did not hurt."
- Unusual placement of the hurricane relative to the jet stream seems to be the main cause
(Geography BA, Earth science PhD)
Some of the weather people I see on Mastodon were talking about how this was a freak happening, but the article helped me understand that better. Forecasting hurricanes has gotten remarkably good, so this was surprising to me.
The interesting question then is why all the models screwed up so badly. Is it because climate change means the model is now inaccurate, or was this within the baseline (no climate change) error rate of current weather prediction technology?
Quoting the article:
> This rich warm water did not hurt matters at all.
> So how did every reliable model we use miss this?
My guess is that if the model accurately represents all the realities being modeled, and if they ran the simulation enough times, they would get Otis in the model. It's very easy to get chaotic behavior out of such a model, or even simple circuitry.
At that point the question is not 'can the model do a run that produces Otis', because at that point it can and does, one run in ten thousand.
The question is, do the forecasters refuse to mention that one run of the model that produced that result. What seemed to happen this time was, not enough data or attention, and nobody ran their model enough times to produce the Otis result in the model. I don't think anyone saw it and discarded it, I think it didn't show up in anybody's runs of their models.
Odds are good that it COULD have, if the models are any good. It's just unlikely.
so this weather forecaster is just doing the same thing, he’s trying to predict future events on past performance.
What they need to do is start looking right in front of their face like you said.
And they need to get some testicles and start screaming that this is a problem at the top of their lungs. And then they need to quit their jobs at these network companies that all advertise for fossil fuel companies.
That was the overall impression I got from the article: model after model predicted unremarkable intensification, and they were consistently wrong.
Out models are only as good as the input parameters, all of which are based on data from a past that no longer applies. Is there a way to apply climate change modelling to short-term weather modelling? Change the forecasting from "we expect such-and-such to happen because that's the most common case over the past 50 years" to something like "in the past we'd expect such-and-such to happen but including more recent work we expect a different thing"?
With their current modeling, the Otis event might have appeared in their model one in a thousand runs, or one in ten thousand, depending on if they're accurately capturing the energy state of the system. They might've discarded it if it came up, as a glitch.
When real life glitches you don't get to re-run the model for more optimistic results.
Lately? Weather predictions have always been a crap shoot. They are better than they've ever been and still only good for about a 48 hours window.
Try looking at weather forecasts from 30 or 40 years ago. You might as well have been reading tea leaves.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461263/iowa-meteorologist...
I agree they need to act but also understand someone not wanting to put themselves or their family at risk.
I stand by literally everything I said, and would add that I expect another event, let's say half an order of magnitude more horrific, within five years.
Due to the nature of what chaos is, there's no telling where and when: could even come out of seemingly nowhere. But it's latent in what the situation is, and is the expression of what chaos means. And when the global system was that few degrees cooler, the upcoming event (or Otis) could not have happened.
Are you serious? People have been screaming about this since the 70s at least. Everyone’s ears are sore so they tune it out.
This is a bit of a strawman. It's not that "no one thought this was possible".
We've known that we will be seeing storms that are larger, stronger, and faster forming than what we've seen before.
It's not been known that our current forecasting tools will be 100% useless in predicting when those much-worse storms would form. That's what was shocking; not just the rate of intensification, but that it failed to be predicted at all, so soon before the event happened.
This guy (Ryan Hall (y'all)) has repeatedly highlighted the high sea temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, stressing that they could produce rapid intensification of hurricanes, several times this season. The times that he drew this to his viewers' attention, the giant storms didn't happen.
This time, in the Pacific Ocean, in a different location not covered by his audience demographic, under the same conditions he's been highlighting right down to the warm ocean waters, the giant storm did.
Our tools are NOT useless, much less 100% useless. We're looking at windows into chaos. The rules are just different. A guy like I mentioned has to be concerned with crying wolf if he repeatedly warns against a super-storm that fizzles, but he's gonna keep doing it if he's honest, because he knows there will come a time when he calls it and is giving a warning for something that will come as a surprise.
You can SEE the conditions and go 'uh-oh'. Our current forecasting tools show these conditions, pretty well. You simply can't be certain which will turn into an explosion, and which will fizzle.
That's nine different prediction models, of which zero predicted anything resembling reality.
Sure, there was less data available than in other areas. Sure, there was less ground radar. Sure, fewer eye flights were made. But there have been other storms with a similar dearth of data; never before have all predictive models been so very wrong.
That's sarcastic, of course. There are a ton of world class programmers working in game dev. And a ton of world class mathematicians working on climate change. Not everyone uses money as their main motivation. Many people choose careers out of passion, or for the good of the world. And the world is a better place because of that, even if those people drive less shiny cars.