Hurricanes and Oil Spills – How they Mix
Thank you, Enviro-Girl, for forwarding me this information:
What will happen to a hurricane that runs through
this oil slick?
• Most hurricanes span an enormous area of the
ocean (200-300 miles) — far wider than the
current size of the spill.
• If the slick remains small in comparison to a
typical hurricane’s general environment and size,
the anticipated impact on the hurricane would
be minimal.
• The oil is not expected to appreciably affect either
the intensity or the track of a fully developed
tropical storm or hurricane.
• The oil slick would have little effect on the storm
surge or near-shore wave heights.
What will the hurricane do to the oil slick in
the Gulf?
• The high winds and seas will mix and “weather”
the oil which can help accelerate the
biodegradation process.
• The high winds may distribute oil over a wider
area, but it is difficult to model exactly where the
oil may be transported.
• Movement of oil would depend greatly on the
track of the hurricane.
• Storms’ surges may carry oil into the coastline
and inland as far as the surge reaches. Debris
resulting from the hurricane may be contaminated
by oil from the Deepwater Horizon incident, but
also from other oil releases that may occur during
the storm.
• A hurricane’s winds rotate counter-clockwise.
Thus, in VERY GENERAL TERMS:
o A hurricane passing to the west of the oil slick
could drive oil to the coast.
o A hurricane passing to the east of the slick
could drive the oil away from the coast.
o However, the details of the evolution of the
storm, the track, the wind speed, the size, the
forward motion and the intensity are all
unknowns at this point and may alter this
general statement.
Will the oil slick help or hurt a storm from
developing in the Gulf?
• Evaporation from the sea surface fuels tropical
storms and hurricanes. Over relatively calm water
(such as for a developing tropical depression or
disturbance), in theory, an oil slick could suppress
evaporation if the layer is thick enough, by not
allowing contact of the water to the air.
• With less evaporation one might assume there
would be less moisture available to fuel the
hurricane and thus reduce its strength.
• However, except for immediately near the source,
the slick is very patchy. At moderate wind speeds,
such as those found in approaching tropical
storms and hurricanes, a thin layer of oil such as
is the case with the current slick (except in very
limited areas near the well) would likely break into
pools on the surface or mix as drops in the upper
layers of the ocean. (The heaviest surface slicks,
however, could re-coalesce at the surface after the
storm passes.)
• This would allow much of the water to remain in
touch with the overlying air and greatly reduce
any effect the oil may have on evaporation.
• Therefore, the oil slick is not likely to have a
significant impact on the hurricane.
Will the hurricane pull up
the oil that is below the
surface of the Gulf?
• All of the sampling to date
shows that except near
the leaking well, the
subsurface dispersed oil is in
parts per million levels or less. The hurricane will
mix the waters of the Gulf and disperse the oil
even further.
Have we had experience in the past with
hurricanes and oil spills?
• Yes, but our experience has been primarily with oil
spills that occurred because of the storm, not
from an existing oil slick and an ongoing release
of oil from the seafloor.
• The experience from hurricanes Katrina and Rita
(2005) was that oil released during the storms
became very widely dispersed.
• Dozens of significant spills and hundreds of
smaller spills occurred from offshore facilities,
shoreside facilities, vessel sinkings, etc.
Will there be oil in the rain related to
a hurricane?
• No. Hurricanes draw water vapor from a large
area, much larger than the area covered by oil,
and rain is produced in clouds circulating
the hurricane.
Learn more about NOAA’s response to the BP oil
spill at http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/
deepwaterhorizon.
To learn more about NOAA, visit
http://www.noaa.gov.
Memorial Day Weekend Sunday
We hit the early service, had breakfast at the Shiny Diner and were home before 10 a.m. when all hell broke loose. We were glad to spend the day at home, cozy inside:
I grew up with cold rain. The rain in Pensacola is warm rain. You might carry an umbrella (umbrellas make me nervous in a thunderstorm; I am afraid they attract lightning) but the rain isn’t that cold, and it dries fairly quickly, unless you get caught in a real downpour. Mostly, you just wait in a store or in a car until the heaviest rain is over.
Oil Slick Barriers in Pensacola
Last night while we ate at Billy Bob’s, we watched the weather station showing a huge weather system blowing up from Mexico towards the east coast of the US. It wouldn’t be so bad except there is that huge oil slick sitting out there, and no matter where it hits, it is going to be bad.
The beaches here are sugary white beaches, and the sand is like powder. If oil hits these beaches, they will be damaged for years and years to come.
Worse, there are all kinds of wetlands that can be damaged, and shrimp farming, and shell fish of all kinds, not to mention the water birds and the marine life. It is one huge, horrible mess.
We saw the barriers going up along the Pensacola Coast, and shudder at how small and ineffective they seem against the gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf on an hourly basis. It is a horror.
In our church, we pray for “this fragile earth, our island home . . . ”
God of all power, Ruler of the Universe
you are worthy of glory and praise.
Glory to you for ever and ever.
At your command all things came to be:
the vast expanse of interstellar space,
galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses,
and this fragile earth, our island home.
By your will they were created and have their being.
(Eucharistic Prayer C, Book of Common Prayer, p. 370)
Please, when you are praying, give a little prayer for all the communities along the Gulf Coast threatened with this man-made tragedy.
A Day in the Sun
Pensacola weather is shifting, from an unusually cold winter into it’s normal steaming summer. The day after I arrived, I headed for church, but while dressing I discovered I had nothing climate-appropriate, and ended up going to church on a cold day with bare legs.
Now the sun is shining, the big-box stores are advertising garden specials and I cannot resist. Even if I can’t live in my house, I can get some things started, and I am eager to start some bougainvillea; I love the way it doesn’t need a lot of water – it grew in the ground in Qatar, and flourished!
It is hard for me to go into a Home Depot, or a Lowe’s; I am still so greatly lacking in sales resistance. The garden section is loaded with temptations:
There is also a beautiful local market, Bailey’s, where I found some gorgeous and irresistable bougainvillea. Just enough, not too much. They also provided me with a six-pack of basil, and a couple gorgeous rosemary starts.
After getting the plants potted and in places where, God willing, they will flourish, I spent another hour pulling weeds out of the lawn. 😦
All in all, it was a great day in the sun. 🙂
Early Morning Souk Al Waqif
One set of packers coming mid-morning, so AdventureMan is staying home, and offers to take me out to breakfast. I’m a cheap date – take me to the Beirut. I love this place.
As we get to the camel lot, we see they are being fed and dressed – a parade?
These guys look sharp. They have a lot of pride in what they are doing. And they have a dashing uniform. He told us they are a part of the Emiri Diwan.
On to the Beirut, and one of my reasons for loving these breakfasts – the souk cops, on their horses. The horses are beautiful, and well controlled. The cops are friendly and patient with all the tourists, and with us ‘locals’ too, when we ask them to pose with our Flat Stanleys. 🙂
It’s a real treat for AdventureMan to have a morning when he can sit outside with me and enjoy his favorite kind of breakfast:
We walked through the souks, and found that by 9:30, it is beginning to get HOT.
Beirut Breakfast
One of the first things that happened when I came back to Doha was my friends took me to breakfast at the Beirut. When they invited me, I was puzzled. The Beirut, as I remember it, was a place on Shara Kharaba (Electricity Street) where you drove up and guys in baseball caps came to your car and your ordered and they brought the food.
My friends are conservative, and fully covered, abaya and niqab. I could not imagine them sitting in an all-men kind of place.
But no, they took me to the NEW Beirut, down in the Souq al Waqif, and oh, what a treat! Everything, all the good foods they always had at the Beirut, only now you could sit at a table and eat! There is a family area upstairs (with a very nice restroom, by the way) and downstairs all the bachelors eat (meaning any male without a female with him) and then there is outside seating which is great when you are meeting up with western friends.
Today I was meeting up with one of my very best friends, a souk buddy, who enjoys just roaming and experiencing as I do. Actually, she had an agenda, and that will be the next blog entry, but we have been friends for a long time. Partners in crime. We egg each other on.
Most of the time we would order felafel (little balls of cooked ground chickpeas – garbanzos – and parsley, deep fried – sort of like hush puppies) and fool – beans, and hummous, with oil or yoghurt or meat. I would see guys eating bowls of stuff, though, like cereal bowls, only it wasn’t cereal, it looked maybe like oatmeal. We asked what it was, and they said it is like breakfast chickpeas and hummos with fried bread – fattoush – with yoghurt over it. So it sort of is like oatmeal, only it isn’t oatmeal. It is called Fatta.
Oh. My. Friends.
All my years in this part of the world, and I didn’t know about Fatta. Instead of forcing myself to eat oatmeal, I could have been eating Fatta.
This is SO delicious. So delicious that I beg you, if it is horrifyingly fattening, please don’t tell me. It has beans, and the fried flatbread, and toasted pine nuts, and slivered almonds, all covered with a coat of yoghurt and a drizzle of really tasty olive oil. It is so unbelievably delicious; if it were equivalent of oatmeal, this is what I would eat every day for breakfast for the rest of my life, it is so good.
But I have the bad feeling that anything so delicious is probably not so good for me. I have the feeling that it is called Fatta because it will make me big and fatta if I continue to eat it and enjoy it as I did today. Oh YUMMMMMMM.
Oh! Didn’t It Rain!
I love it that this YouTube version of Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of “Oh Didn’t It Rain!” starts out with photos in Wadi Rum in Jordan, a couple peeks at Petra, and as the camera backs off, the effects of wind and rain on the topography of the Wadi Rum area. We camped there for three nights, lo, these many years ago, going on camelback into the deeper parts of the canyon. It was unforgettable.
My trip back into Doha last night was unforgettable.
In what is usually the most mundane of flights, we found ourselves bumping up and down with lightning striking all around us, from about the halfway point all the way into Doha. I’ve never had a lot of faith in the aerodynamics that keeps airplanes up in the air, and seeing flashes of lightning all around me was a genuinely religious experience, LOL.
(From article on lightning strikes plane in Japan: According to a Scientific American article about lightning strikes and aircraft, its is “estimated that on average, each airplane in the U.S. commercial fleet is struck lightly by lightning more than once each year”. However, the article notes that the last crash directly attributed to a lightning strike occurred back in 1967 when the fuel tank exploded.)
At the airport, all the baggage handlers actually had on rain-gear, and on the way home, there were deep pools where drains have clogged. And, as AdventureMan said, when you live at sea level, just where is the water going to drain?
I am so thankful to be home. Home for the next scant three weeks, anyway, as I pack up all those boxes once again for what we think will be (one of) our last moves. Sorting, giving away, “can I live without this if I leave it behind?” “Will I regret it forever if I leave this behind?” “Is there someone who could give this a good home?”
I have two great avenues of disposal; my own church, where incoming church personnel can make use of household goods and not have to buy everything new, and my housekeeper’s church, where they cherish anything they get.
To Kuwait: Happy Liberation and Independence Days Celebrations
Wishing all my Kuwait friends all the blessings of liberty, and independence.
I always remember February in Kuwait as being one of the nicest months of the year – so how is it this year? My friends in Doha tell me they are having a heat wave!
Warming Up in Pensacola
This guy hurts my eyes. I remember reading a book called Almost French, an Australian woman married a French guy, and one morning as she was about to run down to the boulangerie in her sweats, her French boyfriend had a very pained expression on his face and said “Please! Please put on something else! You don’t want to hurt people’s eyes!”
Pensacola is warming. No matter how much Pensacola warms, I think a shirt would be a good idea.
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