NOT Jim Cantore wrote:
Flagpole wrote:
No, you are an idiot. I didn't suggest any of the things you said there. You CAN actually have a stalled category 4 storm due to another system holding it there, and meteorologists were suggesting that that COULD have been the case. Of course there is going to be a lot of damage from the rain and the storm surge, but again, a stalled category 4 is much worse than a stalled category 2, and a category 4 CAN stall just like a 2 can. YOU don't know what YOU are talking about. No matter what you say, a category 2 storm in this case is better than a category 4. You are simply wrong.
Let me throw my 2 cents into this discussion.
Flagpole - I think what the guy is saying is that in this case (Florence, specifically) the meteorological causes for the "weakening" of the storm (it actually strengthened - we can get into a whole discussion on the pitfalls of the Saiffir-Simpson Scale later) also were responsible for it stalling, growing immensely and thus doing more potential damage. The reports I saw said that if this weather system did not exist then it would have remained a Cat 4 (was never a Cat 5) and not stalled, thus actually causing less damage. Jim Cantore is right in that this hurricane was not going to remain a Cat 4 AND stall. - "same forces that was (sic) caused a lessening in the strength of the winds is also slowing the storm down and has caused it to double in size "
You are partially right in that a stalled Cat 4 can do more damage than a stalled Cat 2, but that is not always the case and not the case with Florence. The categorizing of hurricanes relies on the Saiffir-Simpson Scale. This scale is based soley on the maximum sustained wind speed measured from a very concentrated area of the storm. Unfortunately, this scale only gives a very small indication of a storm's true destructive power. More important than simply maximum wind speed in a small portion of the hurricane are the size of the storm (larger the storm the more widespread damage), amount of moisture carried by the storm (flooding from rainfall is devastating), and how far from the center the tropical storm force winds reach (a storm can be very intense in a small area, but the rest of the storm would be considered "weaker").
Using the Saiffir-Simpson Scale is a very simplistic, limited metric when determining how dangerous the storm is. In my opinion it is cited too often by the media and gives an incomplete view of really how dangerous a storm is to those who are not informed on what the real destructive power of a hurricane is.
Now back to discussion the "orange" one.
Thanks for putting it much more diplomatically than I did.
I doubt he’ll understand. He’s either an idiot or obtuse. I’m leaning toward the former.