Another interesting article in this am newspaper about the forecast. Looks like Norfolk kept planning...that was wise. Other cities did not. I included the article...but you should click on the link to see what they found as they pumped out a completely full underpass in Norfolk.
http://pilotonline.com/news/local/weather/storms/among-lessons-learned-from-hurricane-matthew-weather-forecasting-isn-t/article_f81404eb-3432-5820-ab66-d49f901958fb.html
Hurricane Matthew's surprise late-round battering of Hampton Roads is a lesson in weather forecasting
By Dave Mayfield
The Virginian-Pilot
Aftermath of Hurricane Matthew.
Bill Tiernan | The Virginian-Pilot
A submerged vehicle in the underpass on Virginia Beach Blvd. near Tidewater Dr. is revealed in Norfolk Monday morning October 10,2016 as pumps were being used to pump water from the completely flooded underpass from heavy rain Saturday night and Sunday.
So, what can we learn from Matthew's surprise late-round battering of Hampton Roads?
Several lessons - one of the most important of which is that weather forecasting isn't an exact science. And, because of that, no matter how often we've gotten off lucky before, it's best to prepare for the worst anytime a hurricane or tropical storm is headed in our direction.
The consensus among forecasters changed in the middle of last week to a prediction that Matthew would turn right and head out into the Atlantic somewhere along the coast of the Carolinas. But "there was lots of conflicting information" to sort through in determining more precisely where and when that would happen, said Ray Toll, a retired Navy meteorologist who now leads coastal resilience research at Old Dominion University.
"I had honestly been concerned all week long" that the storm still could end up slapping Hampton Roads, even though the National Hurricane Center's track forecast map removed the region from the likely path early on Wednesday.
Toll said the biggest uncertainty was how much a cold front that had been blowing from the northeast would stand in the way of Matthew as the storm moved northward. It turned out to be less of a deterrent than expected, and Matthew crawled 100 miles farther up the North Carolina coast - then drifted away from Cape Hatteras more slowly than predicted, too. That drew out our misery as bands far from its eye pummeled Hampton Roads with rain.
"It's called a forecast for a reason. It's really a guess, but that's hard to relate to people," said Robb Braidwood, Chesapeake's deputy director of emergency management.
Meteorologists in the National Weather Service's Wakefield office, which oversees forecasts in Hampton Roads and northeastern North Carolina, had raised concerns last week that Matthew might deviate back into the danger zone for the region - even after the Hurricane Center's track changed to curve away from us. But the Wakefield office's official forecasts into Friday evening called for only 2 to 4 inches of rain. Parts of the region ended up with more 12 inches Saturday and Sunday.
Braidwood said that when other rains, including deluges in late September, are taken into account, roughly 30 inches have fallen on sections of Chesapeake in the past few weeks. That's almost as much as the city had recorded for the rest of 2016 before then.
"We had 30 neighborhoods flooded in the city in this event that had never flooded before," Braidwood said, and some of them wouldn't have been swamped if the ground hadn't already been saturated from the earlier rains.
The lingering impact of previous storms has to raise the level of alert when sizing up how vulnerable the area is, he said.
Lori Crouch, a spokeswoman for Norfolk, said city officials kept emergency planning going all through last week, even after the forecast consensus was that the region would avoid a direct hit.
"The messaging was that even if we don't get a lot of rain and wind, we still could get downed trees because of the ground being so wet already," she said.
That would mean power outages and blocked streets.
Plenty of bad things did happen. Hundreds of trees fell in the city, more than 100 vehicles had to be towed from flooded Norfolk intersections, and a couple of underpasses were overwhelmed by stormwater. But Crouch said crews had worked all week to clear debris from streets that might have clogged drains for key thoroughfares, and she said shelters were opened as planned with as little as 45 minutes' notice when the emergency arrived.
Skip Stiles, executive director of the Norfolk-based nonprofit Wetlands Watch, said Matthew has given the region an opportunity for self-examination: "I think the storm exposed the worst of the worst flooding areas, and you can step back from this to figure out where the high-priority fixes should be."
He said there's valuable new information from Matthew that can be fed into local models for forecasting flooding. Those models have largely been built around predictions of storm tidal surges, whereas the flooding in Matthew was mostly rainfall-driven.
Like others, Stiles said one of the most valuable lessons from Matthew is to be prepared for a hurricane or tropical storm whenever there's even just the slightest chance it might be a threat. Storms of that type are "like a spinning top" that just might bob in our direction suddenly, he said.
Hurricane season goes through the end of November. That leaves plenty of time to stay on guard.
Dave Mayfield, 757-446-2341, dave.mayfield@pilotonline.com |