The dire predictions for Hurricane Matthew seem to be a bit . . . overblown.
It's staying considerably further to sea than they led us to believe and Floridians aren't experiencing anything horrendous. Not yet, anyway.
On the radio today, one of the talk show hosts tried to make the case that Matthew's potential was exaggerated. He then said, 'For one thing, Matthew is a 3, and Katrina was a 5 bearing down on a below-sea-level city.'
The last part of his statement is correct, but Katrina was, like Matthew, a 3. Both storms were 5s prior to landfall, but they weakened significantly as they approached the continental U.S. Katrina hit with 125 mph winds. Matthew, the last I heard, has NOT hit and was 130 mph when it made its closest approach. It is weaker than that now.
The myth that Katrina was some sort of a monster persists and that's, no doubt, how history is going to remember it. It was, however, an an average storm that hit in the nation's most poorly prepared urban location. And that made all the difference.
On a somewhat different topic, the graphic above improves considerably as Matthew approaches Florida. The reason for this is that the early part of the video is comprised of images captured through sporadic satellite imagery and weather planes that flew into the storm. The latter part of the video comes from ground-based radar which gives more frequent and better piercing photos. Once a storm is close enough for ground-based radar to be used, it can be watched in depth, practically real-time.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
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