I Don't Like Ike

Hurricane Ike is currently a Category 2, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a massive, destructive storm, and while it will probably be a strong 2/weak 3 at landfall, its storm surge looks like it will be significantly worse:

The amount of water Ike has put in motion is about 10% greater than what Katrina did, and thus we can expect Ike’s storm surge damage will be similar to or greater than Katrina’s. The way we can estimate this damage potential is to compute the total energy of Ike’s surface winds (kinetic energy). To do this, we must look at how strong the winds are, and factor in the areal coverage of these winds. Thus, we compute the Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE) by squaring the velocity of the wind and summing over all regions of the hurricane with tropical storm force winds or higher. This “Integrated Kinetic Energy” was recently proposed by Dr. Mark Powell of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division as a better measure of the destructive power of a hurricane’s storm surge than the usual Category 1-5 Saffir-Simpson scale. For example, Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi as a strong Category 3 hurricane, yet its storm surge was more characteristic of a Category 5 storm. Dr. Powell came up with a new scale to rate potential storm surge damage based on IKE (not to be confused with Hurricane Ike!) The new scale ranges from 1-6. Katrina and Wilma at their peaks both earned a 5.1 on this scale (Figure 2). At 12:30pm EDT today, Ike earned a 5.2 on this scale, the second highest kinetic energy of any Atlantic storm in the past 40 years. Hurricane Isabel of 2003 had the highest.

Simply put, Ike has the potential to do really serious damage with its surge, which could be high enough to overtop the 17-foot-high storm wall at Galveston — Jeff Masters estimates the possibility at about 10 percent, which would make me pretty nervous if I was a Galvestonian. The current National Weather Service advisory for Galveston is pretty blunt:

All neighborhoods… and possibly entire coastal communities… will be inundated during the period of peak storm tide. Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one or two story homes may face certain death. Many residences of average construction directly on the coast will be destroyed. Widespread and devastating personal property damage is likely elsewhere. Vehicles left behind will likely be swept away. Numerous roads will be swamped… some may be washed away by the water. Entire flood prone coastal communities will be cutoff. Water levels may exceed 9 feet for more than a mile inland. Coastal residents in multi-story facilities risk being cutoff. Conditions will be worsened by battering waves closer to the coast. Such waves will exacerbate property damage… with massive destruction of homes… including those of block construction. Damage from beach erosion could take years to repair.

Needless to say, if you’re still in Galveston, get out of Galveston. A 10 percent chance of imminent death is not something you want to play around with.

At best, it looks like much of the Texas coastline is going to get walloped with tropical storm-to-hurricane force winds, and very serious, if not catastrophic, damage in Galveston and Houston. Ike is currently forecast to come aground early Saturday morning. Stay safe, Texas.