9 ms·
Trying to make sense of why Otis exploded en route to Acapulco
- btbuildem 3y agoI've always found the relative unreliability of meteorological predictions fascinating. A lot of the time they're spot on (even the notorious "probability of precipitation") and the way we're able to track and predict storm paths is so impressive. But from time to time we get an event like this, and it really underscores how little we really know. The sheer complexity of the phenomena / the theory we use to contain and understand them, it just seems to misfire spectacularly on occasion. In a fantasy world, I would like to see weather forecasts that reach several months out, with high reliability. Mapping winds, precipitation, etc, with high spatial and temporal accuracy.
- tills13 3y ago> even the notorious probability of precipitation Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding what you're saying but when it says "30% chance" what it is actually saying is "there's a 100% chance of rain in 30% of the coverage area". Not sure if that makes it more or less accurate.
- darkstarsys 3y agoThat's not true. For instance: https://www.weather.gov/ffc/pop#:~:text=What%20does%20this%20%2240%20percent,at%20least%200.01%22%20of%20rain https://www.weather.gov/ffc/pop#:~:text=What%20does%20this%2....
- tills13 3y agoAh ok it must be a Canadian thing, then: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/types-weather-forecasts-use/public/guide/elements.html#:~:text=The%20Chance%20of%20Precipitation%20(COP)%20is%20the%20chance%20that%20measurable%20precipitation%20(0.2%20mm%20of%20rain%20or%200.2%20cm%20of%20snow)%20will%20fall%20on%20%E2%80%9Cany%20random%20point%20of%20the%20forecast%20region%E2%80%9D%20during%20the%20forecast%20period https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services....
- btbuildem 3y agoIt's the inherent confusion and misunderstanding that I mean :)
- Applejinx 3y agoFor a weather forecaster this is a really strange take. Anybody who understands what the big words 'climate change' mean, could have predicted this. HAVE predicted this. I personally have predicted this and I'm not even a weather forecaster, I just know what chaos theory is. Adding energy to the system produces a wider range of possible outcomes. This is absolutely one of the possible outcomes. A few degrees less warming and it might not have been possible. Chaos is STRANGE. It's sensitive to initial conditions. One of those conditions is the total energy in the system. This is what happens when you add a few degrees to the whole planet. It'll act normal, sort of, maybe for quite a while… then bam. Because this is what you get when you add energy to a chaotic system the size of a planet, and it will happen again. We just got a picture of the new range of possible event… or of something WITHIN the new range of possible event, which by no means is guaranteed to be the most dramatic climate outcome currently possible. This was probably on the high end of possible events but might not even be the most extreme thing that can now happen with this level of climate energy. Climate energy is still increasing.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI agree with all of this except the first sentence. Weather people understand all this too, but forecasters were genuinely shocked by the speed of the transition from tropical storm to cat 5 - a process that they're used to observing over days suddenly took place within hours. Knowing a thing and seeing/experiencing it directly are very different. I'm shocked myself by the degree of devastation, and suspect the reported death toll is low. Some of the damage can be ascribed to corruption and lax building codes, But the sight of multiple recently constructed high rise buildings completely trashed has to be sending a cold chill down the spines of insurers and emergency planners.
- peteradio 3y agoSometimes you roll 6 6s and that's a yahtzee, same thing in nature. All those butterflies get their wings lined up and boom cat 5.
- bloopernova 3y agoAnd we have 10 to 20 years before effects from current emissions are felt: https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-time-lag-of-climate-change/ https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-time-lag-of-climate... As COVID-19 showed us, humans aren't great at dealing with delayed effects.
- vasdae 3y ago[flagged]
- soneca 3y agoCloudflare blocked me from accessing it. edit: wow, that was some unexpected downvotes
- nickpeterson 3y agoThe unpredictability of the clouds strikes again!
- HPsquared 3y agoI guess the clouds... Flared up
- yosito 3y agoSame
- zx8080 3y agoSame here. A new network censorship? F#ck cloudflare.
- bell-cot 3y agoHow about the Ars reprint of the story? https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/trying-to-make-sense-of-why-otis-exploded-en-route-to-acapulco-this-week/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/trying-to-make-sense...
- soneca 3y agoIt works, thanks!
- esperent 3y agoSame here.
- hedora 3y agoIt is also on archive sites. Can anyone recommend a good one-click firefox extension to open an archive copy of the current page?
- uticus 3y ago> So how did every reliable model we use miss this? That’s for graduate students and researchers to answer in the coming years, because I have no formal idea. Would love to see followup on this. Wish there were some way to like bookmark or something and come back in a few years.
- esalman 3y agoAs far as I know some models gave the storm a 25% chance of rapid intensification. The actual storm itself just unraveled afterwards.
- Eduard 3y agoadd a calendar event for when you want to be reminded
- lurking_swe 3y agothere is already a very good theory. see this interview with an expert from Yale: https://youtu.be/CSVFpval4Dw?si=oelutbqzOGcpI8gm https://youtu.be/CSVFpval4Dw?si=oelutbqzOGcpI8gm tldr: garbage data into the model, garbage out. Detailed summary from interview: • only 1 hurricane hunter flight was done into this storm. • mexican hurricanes just don’t get as much reporting coverage (historically). For example for atlantic hurricanes, NOAA hurricane hunter airplanes have tail doppler radar, which provides good data to feed into the model. • without detailed doppler radar, they had to fallback to satellite measurements. • Mexico doesn’t have ground based radar coverage at all, like the US coast does.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoThere's something going on over there: "From October 9 to October 25, western Mexico has been hit by FOUR consecutive eastern North Pacific tropical cyclones. " https://twitter.com/DrKimWood/status/1717557808147943922 https://twitter.com/DrKimWood/status/1717557808147943922 I found this analysis more comprehensive https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/10/nightmare-scenario-category-5-hurricane-otis-devastates-acapulco/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/10/nightmare-scenari...
- zootboy 3y agoThis headline could really use the word "hurricane" in it. I had no idea what Otis or Acapulco were, and my initial guess was wildly off: some sort of space probe experienced a catastrophic failure on the way to an asteroid.
- IRP 3y agoI don't know why, I first thought of an airplane. Yeah, headlining is an art...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- trinsic2 3y agoExact. Same. Guess. on my end.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoI'm all for naming an asteroid "Acapulco", though.
- aifooh7Keew6xoo 3y agoA gold-bearing asteroid, naturally.
- crdrost 3y agoOtis is the name of one of the Fat Bear Week audience favorites so that was where my first thoughts went but I was very surprised to imagine an “Acapulco, Alaska” near where he lives.
- poink 3y agoIn fairness, anyone who didn't immediately recognize 128 Grazer as the fattest bear is probably frequently confused :P
- phreeza 3y agoI somehow thought it was an obscure motorcycle brand, that broke down on a long road trip in Mexico.
- wg0 3y agoWe did find clay tablets with inscriptions from earlier civilizations. If all papers, books and newspaper gradually go digital, just electric charges or magnetic blips in racks - few thousand years down the road our civilization would be virtually traceless or at least those parts of it. Nothing is forever. Just a random thought.
- atum47 3y agoanybody else getting blocked by cloudflare?
- hnburnsy 3y agoThe first NHC advisory mentioning the rapid intensification into a Cat 4... --- https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2023/ep18/ep182023.discus.010.shtml https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2023/ep18/ep182023.discus.0... TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM Hurricane Otis Discussion Number 10 NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL EP182023 400 PM CDT Tue Oct 24 2023 Otis has undergone very rapid intensification today. An eye became apparent on visible satellite images only a few hours ago, embedded in very deep convection. An Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft penetrated the eye around 1900 UTC and again around 2000 UTC, and found that the maximum sustained winds had increased to near 110 kt over a very small area near the center, while the central pressure remarkably dropped around 10 mb from the first to the second center fix. The intensity of Otis is well above the Dvorak satellite estimates, and again underscores the value of aerial reconnaissance in monitoring hurricanes. Otis should remain in an atmospheric and oceanic environment that will be conducive for further strengthening later today and tonight. Vertical wind shear should not be too strong, with SSTs near 30 deg C. Based on the observed changes, the short-term official intensity forecast remains above the model guidance. The system is now forecast to be at extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane status by the time it reaches the coast of southern Mexico late tonight or tomorrow morning. After landfall, the system should weaken rapidly over the mountainous terrain of Mexico. The hurricane continues on about the same heading, or around 330/7 kt. For the next couple of days, Otis should move between a mid-level ridge to the east and northeast and a trough to its northwest. The official track forecast is about the same as the previous one and is a little faster than the dynamical consensus. On this track, the center of the hurricane will make landfall within the hurricane warning area late tonight or early Wednesday.
- jacquesm 3y agoI think we'll see more of this sort of thing. Weather models have been made in a climate somewhat different than the current one and those models are relatively accurate when modeling the past. As more data rolls in about anomalies like this the models will get updated and they'll become more accurate again in specific cases that are outliers right now, but they may end up slightly less accurate overall (due to the increased bandwidth of possible outcomes). This happens in almost every field where modeling is used to predict complex systems. You can't guarantee both great performance on past data and great performance on data that you haven't seen yet, there is always the risk that you've lost generality as you increased accuracy.
- davedx 3y agoOverfitting
- yhvh 3y agoObviously going loco down in Acapulco
- kristianpaul 3y ago“It feels like this was a combination of bad luck, bad timing, and bad placement. And it just so happened that a metropolitan area with over 1 million people was in the way.”
- patrickwalton 3y ago> Otis intensified so quickly that it basically outran the ability to measure how intense it actually was. We're working on this problem at Care Weather (www.careweather.com). Current wind sensing satellites only measure ocean surface winds once per day. They're too expensive for governments to build additional satellites for more frequent refresh. We're lowering their cost by three orders of magnitude and launching a constellation to get hourly updates.