A friend, who's a bigwig in the Sierra Club, just turned me on to this obscured story:
Do you remember hearing about Hurricane Catarina? No, not Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast this past September. Hurricane Catarina (also known as Aldonca), which formed in the South Atlantic and hit land south of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in March, 2004.
"So what?" you say, despite your unexpressed, but obvious concern for the people affected.
Turns out that this relatively mild -- by "our" recent standards, that is -- Category 1 storm (with winds estimated at 85 mph and which damaged 30,000 homes, killed at least 3 and injured at least 38) was the first South Atlantic cyclone ever recorded to reach hurricane-strength winds and hit land. Further, it was one of only three South Atlantic cyclones to have ever been recorded by weather satellites. (Two were in 2004.)
There once was a time that meteorologists thought that South Atlantic cyclones were an impossibility. Guess they were wrong.
Can you say "aquecer-se global?"
Wikipedia, for more on Catarina and South Atlantic cyclones.
Satellite image and storm track off Brazilian coast
1 comment:
Great post, Randy!
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