Originally published at: Camera on dock captured the insane moment Hurricane Ida made landfall | Boing Boing
…
9 Likes
Well that escalated quickly!
40 Likes
Sounds like a fax machine.
11 Likes
Sometimes you hit the wall, and sometimes the wall hits you.
16 Likes
I find it hard to believe that video was not edited. Wouldn’t there be waves or surge pushed in front of the hurricane? I know the internal winds are strong but the actual speed of the hurricane as a whole system is not super fast.
Also puzzling is that the video contradicts itself – it says it captures the moment Ida hit the coastline, but also that it was taken “in the eye” of the hurricane. Only one of those can be true. Perhaps our British friends at the Guardian aren’t familiar with how hurricanes work.
31 Likes
Yes it was a Fax from Mother Earth, it read, get your shit together, I think she’s angry, again.
19 Likes
Yeah, this gives more questions than answers. I can’t believe it went from calm to oh shit in like a frame.
18 Likes
Inside the eye is proverbially calm and high pressure, so the water level is low but not rough. The eye wall, on the other hand, is the fastest wind in the whole system and the wind shear at the edge is like 0-250 kph in a matter of a few meters. Needless to say, winds like that at the surface kick up some epic waves tangential to the eye and therefore somewhat outward. WHAM!
ETA: to the extent that there is wind inside the eye, it is radially inward. The eye is where warm air ascends; the incoming air, as with a tornado, is driven by Coriolis effect to spin faster and faster as it approaches the center.
I apologize for previously getting the pressure relationships backwards; it’s been six years since my atmospheric physics class and for whatever reason still get them wrong.
19 Likes
I’m confused because the way I’m picturing it, if the video starts with the camera in the eye of the storm, then half of the storm had already passed over, yet the dock appears to be intact and undamaged. Could the intensity of the winds have been much less as the eye approached, and then much more as it departed?
4 Likes
It’s a video of the eyewall reaching shore, which is the point when the strongest winds arrive. The brief calm that happens in the middle of the eye would not come until after this video ends
6 Likes
The issue is that the video goes from utter calm with normal sea levels, to full winds that blow the sprays into almost zero visibility, a sea level many feet higher and large pieces of wood blowing in front of the camera, from one frame to the other.
We may be wrong but it strains credulity that the change can be SO sudden; given the absence of timestamps in the video, it gives rise to the suspicion that a certain interval was deleted from between the two scenes in order to produce a “before and after” effect.
12 Likes
I hadn’t actually watched this clip from the Gaurdian in the OP. Yes, there are hours cut out suddenly between early Sunday morning and when the eyewall hit Sunday evening.
I was thinking it was the same clip as posted in the Hurricane Ida thread.
7 Likes
Hurricane Binary.
3 Likes
This is edited, probably by hours. There is absolutely no way anything can move that much water that instantaneously. hurricanes are not tornadoes (though they can spawn them) but even if this were a tornado it wouldn’t come with a storm surge that goes from 0 to 6ft in the blink of an eye (pun… intended).
4 Likes
56 modem?
3 Likes
Can we get an affiliate link for that camera?
2 Likes
Often a local news presenter would drag out her introductions to these crazy Web videos and by the time they switched to it, the moment had passed… she would go “wow” , read some more copy while the video was replayed from the start , then they would cut away to the next story before it comes around again.
This feels similar.
1 Like
I’m still confused: per the video’s caption, it seemingly starts with the location being inside the eye, and then the hurricane wall hits (so the area is leaving the eye)
What happened when the area first entered the eye, which should have happened before? Shouldn’t it have hit the hurricane wall first at that time?
1 Like
I can imagine that when the eyewall first passed over, the camera didn’t see interesting stuff so much because it was on the leeward side. After the eye passed over the already weakened beams get slammed from the other side, and whammo. The rest is basically the camera lens getting swamped by rain, now that the roof has been compromised.
1 Like
