Wind Storms Here and There

Another benefit of living in the upper left corner of the lower forty-eight is being able to watch things like Hurricane Ivan from well afar. There is a certain suspense in watching where the forecasters think it's going to go next.

Of course, it's nowhere near the level of suspense that people down in Dixie must feel. And they have it better than before; for some reason, I can't help but think back to the time before there were satellites, and forecasters had to guess at what was coming thier way. Just like many terrible, destructive things in nature, hurricanes are quite beautiful. From orbit, they are lyrical pinwheels. The eye wall, from inside the eye, is a thing of majesty.

Here in the Willamette Valley, we just have windstorms. They get nasty to compensate for thier infrequency. Some like to call them hurricanes, and technically they are mostly correct; the National Weather Serivice defines hurricane force as 73 mph and above, no matter what storm they come out of. A particular historic one was the "Columbus Day Storm" of 1963, where winds above hurricane force were recorded up and down the valley. Just about every adult of my parent's generation has a story, and can tell you where they were and what they were doing during it. That's how big the event was.

Back in about 1998 or 1999, I think it was, we had our own version. Video of the day on channels 2, 6, and 8 were trees falling into houses.

It is possible to tell if if an approaching storm is going to be an Oregonized hurricane. Low pressure centers usually approach Oregon from the west or northwest. They spend thier fury against the Coast Range and then move across the Valley, dropping the rest on the Valley floor before giving up most of the rest of thier stuff as snow on the Cascades. It's most of the reason that the eastern 2/3rds of Oregon is as dry as it is. Sometimes, however, a particularly strong low moves from the south, paralleling the coast. It stays connected to its power source (the Ocean), and seems to use the south-to-north lay of the Valley to intensify its force.

But, like I said, it doesn't happen often. Like major earthquakes, they make up for thier absence with what amounts to thier presence.

And our hopes and prayers go out to the people about to be impacted by Ivan. It's not going to be pretty, especially if the point of impact is New Orleans. That city, protected by its levees, is actually below sea level. According to reports on Yahoo! News, if NO does sustain a direct hit, the city could be made uninhabitable for weeks, while the levees actually trap water inside the city to a depth of 20 feet, making the whole thing all but a ruin.