cities that swear the least throughout the course of the day. In fact, El Paso was tied for fourth on a list of major U.S. And eventually it gets enough dry air and cooler air, and it dissipates - or it runs into land and dissipates.EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) – It turns out that El Pasoans don’t have that much of a dirty mouth after all, at least according to a new study conducted by. You take the heat from the tropics and you move it toward the mid-latitudes. What's the most efficient way to do that? It's a hurricane. The way the planet handles that is, it takes heat and transports it. That's physics: You've got a lot of heat at the equator and you don't have a lot of heat at the poles. You know, the reason we have hurricanes is heat transport. People need to understand that, and know what the impacts are and what it means for them. So you have higher winds over a larger area in the hurricane and maybe not as high in the center. But if the center of the storm lessens its intensity, all that means is, that energy had to go somewhere - it doesn't disappear. Maybe it's not a Category 4 when it hits. And if it slows down, it rains more over your area. Because these things, as they turn, they have to slow down, that's just physics. And little differences will matter to people on the ground, where they live.Įverybody's going to get a heck of a lot of rain - a foot of rain, and higher amounts in some areas, as it slows down. The trick is, when and how much of a turn is it going to be? Ian has to participate in that flow - it has no choice. It has to go off to the northeast at some point in time. Ian's outer edges are already influenced by that trough. It's been picked up by this trough, which is going all the way down into the middle part of the Gulf of Mexico and then extends off the coast of North Carolina and then up, off the coast of Newfoundland. NOAA/NESDIS/STAR Hurricane Ian's outer edges (in green) are already influenced by a trough (in purple), forcing it to turn north and then northeast, according to Joel Cline, tropical program coordinator for the National Weather Service. The storm is butting against a high trough of dry air Obviously, it's not going west, it's going north now. So at some point when a storm moves north away from the equator, it's going to be caught in a different flow and move in a different direction and recurve, as we call it. In the mid-latitudes, weather moves from west to east. Ian has been passing through a transition zone The reason you need somebody monitoring them all the time, 24-7, 365, is because the atmosphere that they're in is constantly changing.Īnd when one recurves from the tropics to the latitudes, that's when it gets more difficult to get correct. Hurricanes are notoriously hard to predictįirst off, there are very few "easy" hurricanes to forecast and they're all different. Below are highlights from our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. We asked Cline about Ian's track, and how those predictions have changed. "It's the impacts that make the difference." "If people think of a hurricane as a dot and a city as a dot, I think they've missed the point." "There's a reason we have this cone of uncertainty," Joel Cline, the tropical program coordinator for the National Weather Service, told NPR. And perilous storm surges and rainfall are predicted to cover wide areas, even far inland. While a map tends to highlight the eye of the storm, Ian is spinning hurricane-force winds up to 40 miles out from its center, with tropical-storm-force winds four times as far. On Monday, for instance, it stressed that "there is still significant uncertainty in the track of Ian, especially in the 3-5 day time frame."Īnd then there's the massive scale of a hurricane. But the NHC has repeatedly warned people against focusing on precise locations on a long-term forecast. People who live in areas vulnerable to hurricanes often look to the cone of uncertainty to determine their own actions - whether they should stock up on drinking water and batteries or evacuate altogether. Forecasters now say it's on a course that could take it through an area close to Tampa. Over the weekend, Ian's predicted path shifted briefly to Tampa, then far north to the Tallahassee area in the Panhandle - and then it moved south again. The National Hurricane Center's initial track saw Ian likely hitting Florida far south of Tampa Bay. The "cone of uncertainty" is the tool forecasters use to illustrate a hurricane's likely path - and that title has been particularly apt for Hurricane Ian, whose predicted track has fluctuated by hundreds of miles as it developed into a dangerous storm.
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