Hurricane Ike - About to Hit Land

Of course at 8:53 p.m. it is totally dark out. The wind is still brisk here on the shores of Lake Conroe but according to the news, the tropical force winds have hit Galveston. The obligatory slickered news wienies are standing out in the driving rain, demonstrating that with a hurricane approaching, the wind blows and the rain falls, albeit not straight down.

I was reading a website - Weather Nerd - and it laid out a couple of phrases that slightly increased my fear factor:

1. I think the general public, nationwide, is going to be stunned and confused when a “Category 2″ or “weak Category 3″ hurricane causes the sort of catastrophic damage that Ike is going to cause.
2. Although still of Category 2 strength, Ike remains larger and more powerful than Category 5 Katrina or Category 5 Rita. As I discussed in yesterday’s blog entry, a good measure of the storm surge potential is Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE). Ike’s Integrated Kinetic Energy has fallen from 149 Terajoules this morning to 124 at 3:30 pm EDT this afternoon. However, this is still larger than the total energy Katrina had at landfall, and Ike’s storm surge potential rates a 5.1 on a scale of 1 to 6.

Right! What he said about the Terajoules.