Blogs of War

Conditions are already looking pretty bad. Lots of web traffic, power outages, and low visibility will probably render them useless soon but follow them while you can.

StormJunkie.com – Live storm chaser stream
Bing Map of South Padre Live Cams
Beach Cam
Birding Center Cam
Isla Grand Beach Resort Cam
Pier 19 Cam
Pirates Landing Restaurant Cam (Port Isabel)
Louie’s Backyard
South Padre Jetties
Hurricane City – Live media from the region

There are too many to list but this represents some of the more active tweeps on the American side of the border. Media, individuals, and local governments can all be found in the list below. I’ve also added the accounts below to a HurricaneAlex list on Twitter.

JimCantore – The Weather Channel
portisabeltexas – 3 mi. from South Padre
abramsandbettes – Stephanie Abrams and Mike Bettes from TWC
CycloneOz – Hurricane Chase Brian Osburn
elozano – On South Padre Island
KVEO – KVEO is the Rio Grande Valley’s NBC affiliate.
ExtremeStorms – Extreme Weather cameraman in S. Padre
cnnfiegel – CNN producer on South Padre Island
Pro8News – Laredo, Texas
krgv – The Rio Grande Valley’s award-winning ABC-affiliate
kgbt – KGBT Action 4 News for the Rio Grande Valley
southpadrelive – JW Wilson
JulianCablancas – Brownsville,TX
CityofMcAllen – Official twitter of the City of McAllen, TX
BrownsvilleNews – Brownsville, Tx
SPadre_Island- Severe weather alerts for South Padre Island

Also Worth Watching:
TWCBreaking – Breaking weather news feed of The Weather Channel
TrackHurricanes – Tracking Hurricane Information and Reports

Common Hashtags
#HurricaneAlex
#Hurricane
#Alex

If you’re aware of other folks worth following let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

The latest advisory from the NHC:

RAINFALL…ALEX IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE TOTAL RAINFALL ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 12 INCHES OVER PORTIONS OF NORTHEASTERN MEXICO AND SOUTHERN TEXAS…WITH ISOLATED MAXIMUM AMOUNTS OF 20 INCHES. THESE RAINS COULD CAUSE LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS AND MUD SLIDES…ESPECIALLY IN MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN. RAINBANDS ASSOCIATED WITH ALEX ARE SPREADING ONSHORE IN NORTHEASTERN MEXICO AND SOUTHERN TEXAS.

WIND…TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED TO REACH THE COAST WITHIN THE HURRICANE AND TROPICAL STORM WARNING AREAS LATER THIS MORNING…MAKING OUTSIDE PREPARATIONS DIFFICULT OR DANGEROUS.

STORM SURGE…A DANGEROUS STORM SURGE WILL RAISE WATER LEVELS BY AS MUCH AS 3 TO 5 FEET ABOVE GROUND LEVEL ALONG THE IMMEDIATE COAST TO THE NORTH OF WHERE THE CENTER MAKES LANDFALL. THE SURGE COULD PENETRATE INLAND AS FAR AS SEVERAL MILES FROM THE SHORE WITH DEPTH GENERALLY DECREASING AS THE WATER MOVES INLAND. NEAR THE COAST…THE SURGE WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY LARGE AND DESTRUCTIVE WAVES.

TORNADOES…ISOLATED TORNADOES ARE POSSIBLE OVER PORTIONS OF EXTREME SOUTHERN TEXAS TODAY.

Rain, not wind, is the biggest threat by far but the balance could shift a little for those near the eye:

VERTICAL SHEAR IS FORECAST TO REMAIN LIGHT UP UNTIL LANDFALL OCCURS IN ABOUT 24 HOURS. GIVEN THAT ALEX IS ALSO MOVING SLOWLY OVER SOME OF THE WARMEST UPPER-OCEAN HEAT CONTENT IN THAT REGION OF THE GULF OF MEXICO…STEADY STRENGTHENING RIGHT UP UNTIL LANDFALL SEEMS REASONABLE. HOWEVER…GIVEN THE RELATIVELY LOW CENTRAL PRESSURE RECENTLY MEASURED BY THE RECON AIRCRAFT…RAPID INTENSIFICATION OF AT LEAST 30 KT IN 24 HOURS IS A DISTINCT POSSIBILITY. THE OFFICIAL INTENSITY FORECAST IS A BLEND OF THE LGEM AND SHIPS MODELS.

If Alex does reach category 2 or weak category 3 status wind becomes a significant concern but flooding will impact, and kill, many more people than wind. FEMA on flooding:

The next time you hear hurricane — think inland flooding!

While storm surge has the highest potential to cause hurricane related deaths, more people died from inland flooding associated with tropical systems from 1970 to 1999. Since the 1970′s, inland flooding has been responsible for more than half of all deaths associated with tropical cyclones in the United States. Flooding from hurricanes can occur hundreds of miles from the coast placing communities, which would not normally be affected by the strongest hurricane winds, in great danger.

Just in from the NHC:

…ALEX BECOMES THE FIRST HURRICANE OF THE 2010 SEASON AND THE FIRST JUNE ATLANTIC HURRICANE SINCE 1995…

The good news is that this is looking like a relatively minor storm – by hurricane standards:

ALEX IS BEING UPGRADED TO A 65-KT HURRICANE FOR THIS ADVISORY. VERTICAL SHEAR IS FORECAST TO REMAIN BELOW 10 KT FOR THE NEXT 24-48 HOURS SO THE HURRICANE SHOULD REMAIN IN AN
ENVIRONMENT CONDUCIVE FOR INTENSIFICATION UP TO LANDFALL. THE SHIPS RAPID INTENSIFICATION INDEX SHOWS A 33 PERCENT PROBABILITY OF RAPID INTENSIFICATION…I.E. A 30-KT INCREASE OVER 24 HOURS. HOWEVER…NONE OF THE OTHER NUMERICAL INTENSITY GUIDANCE SHOWS ALEX STRENGTHENING BEYOND CATEGORY ONE STATUS PRIOR TO LANDFALL. THE OFFICIAL INTENSITY IS VERY CLOSE TO THE LGEM GUIDANCE AND ABOUT THE SAME AS THAT FROM THE PREVIOUS PACKAGE.

This storm is still a significant danger to those along the Mexican and Texas coasts near landfall. Rainfall and flooding will be a far bigger threat than wind.

Alex is expected to be at the low-end of the hurricane strength spectrum, but still will bring torrential rains to a Rio Grande delta region ill-suited, both economically and geographically, to handle it.

Passing showers Tuesday quickly pooled along parts of downtown streets in Brownsville and Matamoros, a worrisome sign with Alex expected to dump eight to 12 inches of rain in the region and as much as 20 inches in isolated areas.

The scope of this is unusual to say the least:

Ten individuals have been arrested in the United States on charges of being Russian agents, the Justice Department announced Monday.

The 10 were “trained Russian intelligence operatives,” a Justice Department spokesman said.

All were charged with acting as agents of a foreign government, and nine also were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.

I can’t remember the last time we rolled up this many deep-cover agents at the same time. I wonder how the Russians will retaliate?

You can read the Justice Department’s criminal complaints here.

Update:
This AP article mentions a bit of tradecraft involving laptops and wireless connections. Interesting but not very surprising given the advantages offered and relative ease in making the connection and transfer.

The models, many of which had been shifting to the upper Texas coast, seem to be moving back down toward the border region. The current 5 day forecast from the NHC has it moving in there as a category 2 storm. Dr. Jeff Masters updates:

The latest 12 UTC (7am CDT) runs of our most reliable computer models have come into much better agreement. A consensus forecast arrived at by averaging together most or all of the tracks of our top models–the GFS, ECMWF, GFDL, NOGAPS, HWRF, UKMET, and GFDN–is pretty much what NHC always uses as the basis of their forecast. This consensus forecast has narrowed in on the region just south of the Texas/Mexico border as being the most likely landfall location, with the usual cone of uncertainty surrounding it. The computer model that had been making the northernmost landfall predictions, the Canadian model, is now projecting a landfall 100 miles south of the Texas/Mexico border. There has been a general southward shift of the models in their latest runs, and the most northerly landfall location, near Port Mansfield, is now being predicted by the HWRF model. The earliest landfall time is Wednesday morning, and the latest is Wednesday night. Which model should you trust? Last year, the best performing models at the 3 day forecast period were the GFS, Canadian, ECMWF, and GFDL.

I wouldn’t say that anyone on the Texas coast is out of the woods just yet. Keep an eye on Alex. These storms can be incredibly unpredictable.

The latest forecast discussion from the NHC:

although the cloud pattern of Alex has become a little distorted this morning…the cyclone has continued to gradually intensify. An Air Force Reserve reconnaissance plane found peak flight-level winds of 66 kt…SFMR values of 51 kt…and a decrease in pressure to 989 mb. Thus the initial intensity is increased a bit to 50 kt.

The initial motion is 330/5…to the right of previous estimates. An upper-level trough seen to the north of the storm may be contributing to the more poleward motion by causing a weakening of the ridge over the Gulf Coast. This trough is forecast to lift out of the area in a day or so…which should allow ridging to build back in slightly and steer Alex more toward the northwest. After that time…the strength of a ridge over the Central Plains should help determine whether the tropical cyclone continues a northwestward motion or makes more of a turn toward the west-northwest. The model guidance is in pretty good agreement through 48 hours…then has a bit more spread. There has been a subtle shift northward with some of the 06z guidance…and the NHC forecast has been adjusted in that direction.

Some northwesterly shear is currently affecting Alex…although this has not prevented the storm from slowly deepening. This shear is forecast to abate by tomorrow as the upper-level trough pulls out of the Gulf of Mexico…which could then allow for more significant strengthening. The statistical models continue to show more intensification of Alex than the dynamical guidance…which seems reasonable given the likely environmental conditions. The NHC forecast is close to the statistical models and the previous forecast.

Dr. Jeff Masters on the various models and the uncertainty associated with this storm – and all hurricanes for that matter:

This consensus forecast has narrowed in on the region near the Texas/Mexico border as being the most likely landfall location, with the usual cone of uncertainty surrounding it. The northernmost landfall location is Port O’Connor, as predicted by the Canadian model. The southernmost landfall location is near Tampico, Mexico, as predicted by the ECMWF model. Alex’s landfall time varies from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning. Which model should you trust? Last year, the best performing models at the 3 day forecast period were the GFS, Canadian, ECMWF, and GFDL. Three out of four of those models are predicting a landfall between Brownsville and Corpus Christi, with only the ECMWF model predicting a landfall well south of the Texas border. With steering currents relatively weak, the uncertainty in landfall location is high. The average error in an NHC 72-hour track forecast last year was 230 miles, which is about the distance from Brownsville to Port O’Connor. Consider also that the NHC cone of uncertainty is the region where 2/3 of the time (using the last 5 years of statistics) the center of a storm will go. That means that 1/3 of the time a storm will not be in the cone of uncertainty. Given the slow motion of Alex and the recent uncertainty of the computer models, people living just beyond the edge of the cone of uncertainty should not be confident yet that Alex will miss them.

In short, residents of Texas and Louisiana can’t take their eyes of Alex yet and significant uncertainty will persist for the next 36-48 hours. However, if I lived between Brownsville and Corpus Christi I’d kick my hurricane preparation into gear immediately. Watches have been issued.

Hurricane season means hurricane blogging. TD Alex shows every sign of becoming hurricane Alex soon and some of models are starting to shift towards the upper Texas coast. Dr. Jeff Masters:

While the track forecast for Alex today through Monday is fairly well-assured, the longer range forecast has become highly uncertain. An increasing number of our reliable models are now indicating Alex may take a more northerly track beginning on Tuesday, with possible landfall on the Texas coast near Galveston on Friday (according to the 8am run of the GFS model) or into western Louisiana on Wednesday (the 8am run of the Canadian model.) The key question remains how Alex will react to the trough of low pressure expected to swing down over the Eastern U.S. on Monday and Tuesday. Most of the models were predicting that the trough would not be strong enough to swing Alex to the north, and several of them continue to predict this. The 8am runs of the NOGAPS and ECMWF models, for example, take Alex into the Gulf coast of Mexico 150 miles south of Texas, on Wednesday. The GFDL and HWRF models split the difference, with the GFDL predicting a Thursday landfall in southern Texas near Brownsville, and the HWRF predicting a Thursday landfall near Corpus Christi. Morris Bender of the GFDL group has just provided me the track forecast from an improved experimental version of the GFDL that shows landfall between Corpus Christi and Galveston. So which model should you trust? Last year, the best performing models at the 3 – 4 day forecast range were the GFS and the Canadian, and these are the models that are currently calling for the more northerly track towards the upper Texas coast and Louisiana. Residents of those areas should review their hurricane preparedness plans and anticipate that Alex could make landfall as early as Wednesday in their vicinity. Residents of the Mexican coast south of Brownsville should make similar plans, as Alex could just as easily hit there.

This is an excellent time for everyone along the Gulf to start thinking about hurricane preparedness if they haven’t already.

If it does head this way I’ll blog the approach and the storm itself – as I did for Ike and storms before it. BoW HQ is relatively safe in a very secure building several stories above ground in downtown Houston. My biggest worry is usually life after the storm.

Check out the weather resources in the left sidebar and stay tuned to Blogs of War for rapid updates if this thing heads our way.

Brought to you by the same folks who created the Tiger Woods accident recreation. This is, on many levels. a frightening turn for journalism but it’s just too funny to pass up.

Joe Pappalardo at Popular Mechanics on why the two cases aren’t as similar as many think:

In short, the dispute between President Truman and Gen. MacArthur was more substantive than what we saw between President Obama and Gen. McChrystal. During the Korean War, after the Chinese invaded Korea to force advancing United Nations troops away from its border, MacArthur agitated in public to attack the Chinese mainland. Truman refused to entertain the idea of a wider war, or the use of nuclear weapons. Contrast that heady dispute with a Rolling Stone article in which administration officials were insulted for not understanding the challenge facing the military: It doesn’t exactly measure up.

In fact, President Truman avoided firing MacArthur for a long time. The General was practically running for the White House from Korea. Truman suffered insults, backbiting and sneers from the revered general. During one meeting, MacArthur greeted his commander-in-chief with a handshake instead of a salute. Truman wisely ignored the slight. (Granted, the war was going well at that point and MacArthur was wildly popular in the U.S.) Truman acted only when MacArthur sent a letter to a congressman that questioned the president’s limited war strategy, which was read on the floor of the House of Representatives. That was impossible to ignore—and the world was watching.

True, McChrystal’s conduct is fairly tame compared to MacArthur’s but in both cases the world was watching. Hendrik Hertzberg makes an excellent point about the impact of McChrystal’s conduct in a wired world:

Just as important, frontline troops nowadays are also online troops. They are plugged in to the Internet, to Facebook, to blogs, to e-mail and Skype. They talk to each other in chat rooms with little or no supervision from the brass. It’s all instant and it’s all in their face. And that, I hasten to add, is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. But it makes the morale of the troops that much more fragile, that much more apt to be affected by relative trivialities. The fact that General McChrystal, along with his “Team America” posse of adjutants, understood none of this was reason enough to send him packing. His “conduct” wasn’t just a disservice to his President; it was a disservice to the men and women under his command.

Peter Roff finds another interesting contrast in the men who fired their generals:

Let’s stipulate, using what some see as the obvious example, that McChrystal is no Douglas MacArthur. True enough, but Obama is no Harry Truman, who was a vigorous and effective commander-in-chief during the earliest days of the Cold War. Obama’s feckless leadership in the war on terror bespeaks a leader who does not want or know how to win the fight we are in. It is notable, for example, that it took nearly 10 months for Obama and McChrystal to meet face-to-face–via a video uplink–after the general called for a significant infusion of troops into Afghanistan. It only took about 10 hours for a meeting to occur once McChrystal’s comments leaked out.