Two days ago, anticipating what government and media forecasters predicted could be a Category 3 or 4 hurricane’s visit to my home in south Florida, just north of Miami and seventeen miles from the coast, I wrote a brief blog piece about my preparations. Immediately afterward, I left the keyboard and started the long, hot, laborious, and sometimes dangerous job of installing hurricane shutters. That took the remaining five or six daylight hours, during which I, with help from a young man who lives with us, installed the downstairs shutters. Yesterday, eight generous men from our church arrived to help with the upstairs shutters, which I can’t safely install myself because neuropathy in both legs (caused by a ruptured disk impeding sciatic nerve function for the last eight years) makes me dangerously unstable on ladders. (It was hard for me to admit that, but my wife finally persuaded me.) It took us about another five hours to install all of those—and help some neighbors with theirs.

After all that, we settled down—with friends who stayed the night with us while evacuating their home much nearer the coast—to wait out the storm, wondering whether it would be scary, as when Hurricane Wilma hit us in 2005 and we wondered if our roof would survive. By late last night, revised forecasts made it clear that our area would experience nothing worse than tropical storm-force winds (39 to 73 mph). As it turned out, we never experienced as much wind or rain as in a typical south Florida afternoon thunderstorm. This morning we woke suffering nothing worse than aching muscles and a few cuts and bruises suffered from handling the panels—plus the aftermath of the stress one feels while anticipating disaster for several days.

There’s a strange mix of feelings after something like that. We thank God that He answered the prayers of thousands for protection, and we continue in prayer for those whom the storm continues to approach even now along the coasts of northern Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. But there’s also a perverse disappointment: We went to all that work, disrupted our lives that much, for what turned out to be nothing? And not just we, but millions of others also? (The lost work time and wasted expense in preparing for Hurricane Matthew’s non-arrival surely mount into the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars.)

This morning our guests joined us for devotions on our back porch under cloudy but calm skies. First we sang the classic hymn, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” the first verse of which is, “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.” Surely God had sheltered us from the stormy blast of Hurricane Matthew, for which we were grateful. But this also reminds us that had He not done so, and had our home been demolished, still God Himself is our eternal home. Then, continuing in my wife’s and my reading through Isaiah, we came to chapter 64, which begins, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence!” A little irony there: praying for God to come in judgment marked by natural upheavals! But we of course prayed for protection from such. Do we always think as God does?

Like many people, we felt some resentment at having been, it seemed, manipulated by forecasters’ warnings that turned out to be badly exaggerated. But of course had they downplayed the risks, and then Matthew had hit us hard, we’d not only have felt betrayed but also been unprepared and possibly suffered serious injury or death. We humans are fickle, aren’t we? Maybe that’s partly because we all too often trust in men rather than in God.

Meteorologist and Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer blogged insightfully about Matthew earlier today, explaining some of the quandaries forecasters face:

Today marks 4,001 days since the last major hurricane (Wilma in 2005) made landfall in the United States. A major hurricane (Category 3 to 5) has maximum sustained winds of at least 111 mph, and “landfall” means the center of the hurricane eye crosses the coastline.

This morning it looks like Matthew will probably not make landfall along the northeast coast of Florida. Even if it does, its intensity is forecast to fall below Cat 3 strength this evening. The National Hurricane Center reported at 7 a.m. EDT that Cape Canaveral in the western eyewall of Matthew experienced a wind gust of 107 mph.

(And pleeeze stop pestering me about The Storm Formerly Known as Hurricane Sandy, it was Category 1 at landfall. Ike was Cat 2.)

While coastal residents grow weary of “false alarms” when it comes to hurricane warnings, the National Weather Service has little choice when it comes to warning of severe weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes. Because of forecast uncertainty, the other option (under-warning) would inevitably lead to a catastrophic event that was not warned.

This would be unacceptable to the public. Most of us who live in “tornado alley” have experienced dozens if not hundreds of tornado warnings without ever seeing an actual tornado. I would wager that hurricane conditions are, on average, experienced a small fraction of the time that hurricane warnings are issued for any given location.

The “maximum sustained winds” problem

Another issue that is not new is the concern that the “maximum sustained winds” reported for hurricanes are overestimated. I doubt this is the case. But there is a very real problem that the area of maximum winds usually covers an extremely small portion of the hurricane. As a result, seldom does an actual anemometer (wind measuring device) on a tower measure anything close to what is reported as the maximum sustained winds. This is because there aren’t many anemometers with good exposure and the chances of the small patch of highest winds hitting an instrumented tower are pretty small.

It also raises the legitimate question of whether maximum sustained winds should be focused on so much when hurricane intensity is reported.

Media hype also exaggerates the problem. Even if the maximum sustained wind estimate was totally accurate, the area affected by it is typically quite small, yet most of the warned population is under the impression they, personally, are going to experience such extreme conditions.

How are maximum sustained winds estimated?

Research airplanes fly into western Atlantic hurricanes and measure winds at flight level in the regions most likely to have the highest winds, and then surface winds are estimated from average statistical relationships. Also, dropsonde probes are dropped into high wind regions and GPS tracking allows near-surface winds to be measured pretty accurately. Finally, a Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer (SFMR) on board the aircraft measures the roughness of the sea surface to estimate wind speed.

As the hurricane approaches the U.S. coastline, doppler radar also provides some ability to measure wind speeds from the speed of movement of precipitation blowing toward or away from the radar.

I don’t think we will solve the over-warning problem of severe weather events any time soon.

And it looks like the major hurricane drought for the U.S. is probably going to continue.

As expected, some global warming alarmists (at CNN, ThinkProgress, Salon.com, and Newsweek) illogically blamed Hurricane Matthew on global warming. Sigh. On what, then, do they blame the record 10.96-year absence of a single Cat-3 or higher landfall on the U.S.? Global warming? “Climate change”? Their idol, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, opined in 2013’s Fifth Assessment Report that there was “low confidence that any reported long-term (centennial) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. More recent assessments indicate that it is unlikely that annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have increased over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

Now we continue to pray for those much more badly harmed by Matthew in Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas, and for others still in Matthew’s path–which could conceivably loop around and come back to south Florida next week. Whatever happens, we join with King David, who in Psalm 18 wrote praising the God who controls all storms:

… In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears. Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked, because he was angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him. He bowed the heavens and came down; thick darkness was under his feet. He rode on a cherub and flew; he came swiftly on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water. Out of the brightness before him hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds. The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice, hailstones and coals of fire. 14 And he sent out his arrows and scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings and routed them. Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.

… This God—his way is perfect; the word of the LORD proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him. For who is God, but the LORD?

 

 

Featured image courtesy of National Hurricane Center/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.