Before and After pictures I took from Hurricane Charley! © Greg Nordstrom 2004...
Notice the flag pole on the after picture I took... Snapped clean in half! INCREDIBLE!!!
Still not much going on in the tropics, but I'm always thinking about it 24/7! With hurricanes on the mind, I wanted to leave everyone a link to an amazing chase account from Hurricane Andrew... The account was written by Richard Horodner about 3 years ago! Again, Mr. Horodner is the second know person to chase a hurricane and is pretty darn hardcore when it come to chasing them! According to his website, Richard has chased well over 50 hurricanes in his life! Knowing all this just makes his account even more amazing! You can almost feel the fear in his account and how it truly affected him to this day!
The whole thread is amazing stuff! Read down to Mike Theiss where he talk about the winds blowing down to the ground and dispersing out during hurricane Charley... One person says he thinks Charley will be upgraded one day to a weak Cat-5, but like Mike Theiss I think it was very close but not quite there... Another couple hours over the water and I think it would have been a Category-5! It was probably only 5 mph or so short in my personal opinion... The winds really were 150mph sustained at times, with gust easily in the Category-5 range! Also, the winds really were blowing down to the ground and dispersing out a lot like Mike talked about... I also completely agree that "mini-swirls" were associated with Charley at landfall... This term was coined by Dr. Ted Fujita when he studied Hurricane Andrew's damage aftermath in 1992...
In my life I have NEVER seen anything like it! I can't believe were coming up on the 6 year anniversary! Wow, time sure flies! For a great account of Hurricane Charley, click on the link below and scroll down to Even Brookbinder's (NWS) account/insight... Also, I'll leave a link to clip of Mike Theiss's Hurricane Charley video... We (Josh Johnson, John Walker, & Myself) were about a mile as the crow flies from Mike's location at the RaceTrac gas station in Charlotte Harbor, FL... His video was pretty much exactly what we saw, but with more debris flying in our spot! I sure wish I would have had a video camera! I did get a lot of great stills, but I guess that's just a product of being a very poor college student(couldn't afford one at the time)... Plus, I didn't know Charley would explode to a strong Category-4 hurricane as fast as it did... When I left it was barely a Category-2! I know I say this all the time, but the eye of Hurricane Charley is without a doubt the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life! Best day of my life hands down!
This is the famous RaceTrac gas station you see in Mike Theiss's video... Again we were about a mile away as the crow flies!
Greg,
ReplyDeleteSeen the latest TNA #'s? Even though May is down a bit, can't complain about a 1.28!
2010 0.80 1.07 1.27 1.40 1.28
Philip: It really is off the charts! Highest values ever recorded... (NOAA started recording the TNA index in 1948)
ReplyDelete2005: 0.46 0.38 0.68 0.81 1.01
2010: 0.80 1.07 1.27 1.40 1.28
Anytime you are ahead of 2005, that's saying a lot! Thanks a lot for posting this in my class as well... I need to focus on this a lot more than I do!