We have a new update on The Future of the Penny Arcade Forums.
Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan Smashed Things. Please Help.
fightinfilipino
Angry as Hell#BLMRegistered User regular
Angry as Hell#BLMRegistered User regular
Huffington Post has a good list of places you can donate to help.
so does USA Today.
as does CBS News.
please help if you can.
this
is Typhoon Haiyan, or Typhoon Yolanda as it's been classified in the Philippines.
it's likely the strongest storm to make landfall in recorded human history. it's more powerful than Sandy or Katrina. even worse, it's hitting the Philippines right after a massive earthquake struck the central Philippines in October.
this storm is ridiculous. some of the video coming out of the PI is hard to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmqMfEUNdNA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPVXMPJDXTA
and it's not done yet. the storm is expected to keep going into Vietnam and Cambodia.
if you can, please donate.
so does USA Today.
as does CBS News.
please help if you can.
this
is Typhoon Haiyan, or Typhoon Yolanda as it's been classified in the Philippines.
it's likely the strongest storm to make landfall in recorded human history. it's more powerful than Sandy or Katrina. even worse, it's hitting the Philippines right after a massive earthquake struck the central Philippines in October.
this storm is ridiculous. some of the video coming out of the PI is hard to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmqMfEUNdNAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPVXMPJDXTAand it's not done yet. the storm is expected to keep going into Vietnam and Cambodia.
if you can, please donate.
fightinfilipino on
+3
Posts
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
It's a bit terrifying. I have more family members flying into the Philippines this weekend and I hope everyone is ok.
Is that a real picture? Or an accurate mockup? Because that's nuts
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
It's a satellite picture from the Japan Meteorological Agency and EUMETSAT.
As a former Gulf Coast resident where I got to experience hurricane "fun" more than once, those in the Philippines most certainly have my sympathies and best wishes.
so long as they're flying into NAIA and stay on the west side, things should be a little better there...
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Edit: I should read the entire OP. Damn. My second question still stands.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Because it doesn't affect the US
Best wishes and prayers going to people there.
It's not on MSNBC or FoxNews because they are jokes.
i called my folks (who live in the US) earlier to today to find out if they'd heard anything. nothing yet. hopefully after the storm passes communication will return.
at one point i couldn't get to the ABS CBN or GMA websites, which was...kind of worrying.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
it's a monster and we have no way to stop it
I really hope people listened and evacuted
Electricity is out for a majority of the Visayas region, but comm lines are slowly getting repaired. Relief operations are ongoing but slow, because the roads are damaged/unpassable due to debris. Tacloban airport is totalled, complicating things further. A developing storm estimated to pass through the same route is poised to arrive in the Philippine Area of Responsibiliy in Monday, which will make relief ops harder.
The government's estimate on dead in Tacloban alone number ten thousand. This is just Tacloban. Haiyan/Yolanda cut through the islands of Samar and Leyte, Panay, most of Cebu, and some of Mindoro as well.
Looting has occured. The Gaisano Mall in Tacloban has been ransacked; the victims, having lost everything they have, are looting whatever they can find. Saw a vid of people rolling out a freezer of ice cream along the muddy streets. Things are bad.
My aunt lives in the west coast of the island to the west and north of Tacloban. We're not close, but I'm worried. As soon as my mother gets word we're sending whatever we can to them. Best we can do in the Metro Manila region is to assist in relief goods repackaging or donate. And pray.
Saying there might be 10000 dead from this.
please donate, to the Philippine Red Cross or others if you can. the damage is unthinkable.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Is it my imagination or is SE Asia getting pummeled by this sort of thing a lot more than normal lately?
Steam ID - VeldrinD | SS Post | Wishlist
the Philippines will never be the same
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
It reached Vietnam, but their government used the military to forcibly evacuate some 1 million people, so there aren't a lot of deaths. Makes me wish this was something my government tried.
I work a call center, and half of our team are in a helpdesk in Manila.
They're all ok and all of their families are ok.
But today, a good third of my calls from existing customers (which was quite high today) all asked how our tech support people were doing and if they were all ok.
Which, you know, is something at least. Normally they're just complaining.
I really hope that everybody here's family and friends are ok.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
I wish I had a zillion dollars so I could give more than a little bit.
My goodness was this storm impressive. I have a friend who was in Tacolaban to document the storm as it passed over and the images he has captured are just shocking. This combined with the fact that this area was hit only a few months ago by a 7.1 earthquake really have dealt these people one of the worst hands possible that mother nature can hand out.
One reason to understand what happened meteorologically in this storm and its significance to meteorology is to further lament the catastrophe that has befallen this region. This tropical cyclone was not only one of the strongest storms to ever have been recorded but was most likely the strongest storm to ever make landfall at it's peak intensity. Now you may be asking yourself, how did a storm like this come to be and how rare are they, or you could just be looking at the images and say to yourself, "well this storm hit an area that was not well developed so it couldn't have been that bad." Well I am here to tell you that it was, in fact the winds in this system were on par with a very strong EF-4 tornado that in some places lasted for hours on end.
So lets dissect this storm and just learn what kind of monster Haiyan really was.....
((Note: I am going to use the term tropical cyclone a lot. This is the scientific name to what kind of system Haiyan is. A tropical cyclone has many regional names, for instance, those in the south Pacific and Indian Ocean call them cyclones; those in the north Atlantic or west Pacific call them hurricanes, tropical storms, and depressions; and those in the north east Pacific refer to them as typhoons and super typhoons. They are all the same type of storm and are not any different what so ever.))
Haiyan was a very rare breed of tropical cyclone, one that even fellow high end storms ever become. Most tropical cyclones have pretty consistent structure to them, they have a concentric eye at the middle with a ring of intense convection that surrounds that. This ring is know as the eye wall and is where the strongest of the cyclone's winds can be found. Expanding farther out from there are the spiral rain bands that give a tropical cyclone its characteristic spiral shape you think of when you picture one. An example of this is pictured below. This is how 98% of all tropical cyclones that form in the region that Haiyan did are structured. Haiyan was not of that 98%, instead it was an entirely different kind of monster. Haiyan was an annular storm.
So what is different about an annular tropical cyclone and what makes them such a bigger threat? Well for starters an annular storm is perfectly symmetrical and lacks any rain bands. Annular storms are thus comprised entirely up of a large eye and a very robust eyewall. Often times they can appear to look like a truck tire or a doughut and are often reffered to as one. Typically an annular storm will form over cooler waters but on occasion you will see a stronger tropical cyclone take on an annular or hybrid appearance and that was the case with Haiyan.
Bellow is Haiyan's false color IR satellite imagery from just before she made landfall. Note how symmetrical she is from the image of the traditional tropical cyclone above.
The cause of Haiyan's transition into an annular storm is not a generally well understood process. The mysteries surrounding the transitions into or formations of an annular system only become more numerous when it happens with a storm that is not common for an annular storm to form in. Typically an annular storm will form in cooler waters and in conditions that are hostile to a tropical cyclone but Haiyan was not in this kind of environment. What we do know is that almost all annular storms do not start out annular and transition into one during their eye wall replacement cycle, or "ERC" for short.
The cause of a typical tropical cyclone's ERC is a fairly advance concept for this forum and I will not try to dive into why and how they happen but I will try my best to describe what occurs during an ERC that results in the formation of an annular system in layman's terms.
As seen in the images above the structure of a cyclone is centered around it's eye. A tropical cyclone is a form of warm core low pressure system with intense convection. In the middle of the storm is where the pressure is at its lowest, around this point you will have convection (thunderstorms) form and thrive in conditions that allow the rapid rise of warm air to fuel their updrafts. The convection acts as a vacuum that compliments the low pressure system and helps air rush towards the center of the storm and then out the top. The closer you get to the eyewall the stronger this effect is and the faster the winds become. So long as nothing exists to disrupt the convection and the center of the low, the storms will continue to get stronger and stronger and drive the pressure in the eye lower and lower. The lower the pressure and the stronger the convection in the eye wall, the faster the winds in the storm become. Once the storm nears or surpasses winds in the 115 mph range the eye of the storm will start to shrink as the eyewall constricts. This action will then in turn pull the rainbands around the storm in closer to the center and sometimes will form a new ring of intense convection. This ring will further strengthen until it becomes a secondary eye wall which will in turn draw in the remaining rainbands and choke off leaving a large concentric eye.
Normally the ERC denotes a drop in the system's intensity but due to the massive size and depth of the convection created in an annular transition a cyclone will actually get stronger. Annular storms also are known to hold their peak intensity for longer than average periods and will take much longer to weaken when encountering hostile environments. Another interesting fact of an annular storm is that they will not have another ERC until they loose their annular characteristics.
Haiyan had a generally brisk forward speed of about 25 mph and this fact coupled with the fact that she was annular allowed her to hold its strength so well as it barreled into the Philippines. Normally as a tropical cyclone begins to approach land it will will start to weaken as more and more of its structure moves over land. This effect is further exacerbated by mountainous terrain like the islands of the Philippines which works to disrupt the storms low level circulation. This effect can commonly be seen in hurricanes that cross over Cuba en route to the Gulf Coast of America and become weakened severely as they traverse over the island's mountains. Haiyan, thanks to its annular characteristics, was able to hold itself together longer as it began to interact with the topography around Tacoloban and thus raked over much of the islands in its path with little dampening of its winds.
While the winds in this storm were most certainly devastating they were not the only killer attribute. More often than not an annular storm will not be very large and thus will not displace as much water in the form of surge but once again Haiyan proved to be an exception of the rules with its massive size. While the lower atmospheric pressure in the center of a tropical cyclone does allow some swelling of the ocean's depth it is actually the wind that generates the majority of the surge. It pushes on the surface of the water much like a canoe's paddle blade does, forcing it to swell up in the direction it is blowing. The wider your windfield and the stronger your winds, the deeper your surge will be.
North of the equator all tropical cyclones spin counter clockwise in a cyclonic fashion. Given Haiyan's almost due east storm motion at the time of its landfall this means that locations north of the storm's eye that were on an eastern facing shoreline were the most vulnerable to the storm's surge. Haiyan's windfield, albeit much stronger, was very comparable to the size of 2012's Hurricane Sandy in diameter. Sandy's surge was epic in many locations along the storm's right front quadrant as it made landfall as an extratropical cyclone in New England but even her surge was miniscule in comparison due to her much weaker winds. Had she been as strong as Haiyan we could have easily seen storm surge totals being double than what they actually were along Long Island and NYC's bays. Sadly The town of Tacloban got to experience this nightmare first hand.
As Haiyan moved to hit Tacloban, it's path wobbled slightly to the south, dooming the city to near absolute destruction. In addition to being subject to winds sustained at 195 mph and gusting well into the 230 mph range, the city of 200,000 was inundated with a storm surge that topped most of the city's coastal buildings above their first few floors. By wobbling to the south the eye of Haiyan barely missed Tacloban, passing just to its south by a just over a mile, forcing the city to be in both the strongest winds and deepest surges of the storm. Some unconfirmed reports claim the surge had exceed over 30ft above sea level in places and this is not completely dismissible due to the size of Haiyan and the topography of the bay in Tacloban.
As Haiyan first approached Tacloban the winds were coming out of the north, pulling the ocean's waters into the bowl shaped bay that Tacoloban is built around. This shape causes a large volume of water to get compressed into a very tiny area, pushing a greater amount of the surge onto land. As the eye then proceed to pass just south of Tacloban, areas at and around the airport as well as locations on the west side of the now swollen bay. With a total lack of barrier islands to protect the city almost the entire metropolitan area found itself at least partially submerged by by the Pacific ocean, completely destroying and washing away what the winds were unable to decimate on their own.
It is not often that a storm of this intensity, size, and structure occurs, and it is even far rarer to have a storm such as this make landfall at its peak. I imagine that this storm will likely stay in the record books at it's current place for a good century.
If you have any questions regarding the climatology and meteorology of this storm and the region it affected please post them as I would love to help further your understanding of this system and thus just how serious of a situation this is.
i've been seeing a lot of internet couch jockeys wondering why the PI wasn't prepared for a storm like this when the region gets upwards of 20 typhoons a year. this explains exactly why this storm was different.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Google's put out a person finder, but it's still being populated slowly, as comm lines in Tacloban just recently went up thru one of the large telecoms in the country, and news from Samar (neighbor island southeast of Tacloban City) just started to trickle in.