Thursday, September 13, 2007

With A Spanish Sounding Name, He Was Bound To Be Trouble

For the last couple of days a tropical "disturbance" had been brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday its winds hit 39 mph, which earned it the formal name of Tropical Storm Humberto. It was expected to come ashore last night as exactly that: A tropical storm.

However, Humberto stunned meteorologists by becoming an actual hurricane with 85 mph winds. In so doing, Humberto set a new record growing--in 16 hours--from an unnamed tropical depression into a full-blown hurricane at landfall.

This comes on the heels of Hurricane Felix, which set its own record by growing from a tropical depression to a category 5 storm in 51 hours. And since both Felix and Hurricane Dean made landfall as category 5 storms, that made 2007 the first time that two such storms made landfall in the same season.

So you skeptics can just keep telling yourselves that none of this has anything to do with global warming. Meanwhile, the rest of us will begin packing our bags for Mars.

0 thoughtful ramblings: