I know the author of the above piece and used to talk to him all the time. He was always into counter ideas. But he sure as heck did not talk to me about this.
Storm Debby Is Deadly — Because It’s Slow
This article ignores a wealth of data on the history of slow-moving storms. The headline has truth; if it moved faster, there would not be as much rain, but it may have gotten over the water faster to intensify again. But when you did into the article, you see one side but not the other.
So here are a few factors:
1) Most slow-moving storms are that way in this part of the season because they are in the area known as the horse latitude, where upper air and low-level winds are, on average, weaker. They got named that for various reasons, all with an origin on weak winds.
2) Slower moving storms also cool water and cause weakening. Florence, for instance, was a classic example. In that case, a large ridge trapped the storm, and the slow movement to the coast and north wind in front of it caused upwelling and cooled the water. The water at Cedar Key, Florida, cooled 8 degrees due to Debby, so hurricanes cool water around them.
3) The big reason for a lot of stalling is interaction with COLD TROUGHS. Harvey was trapped by one. So was this storm. Both of them could not come back after making landfall and getting back over the water.
My point is there are two sides of the issue. Yet that is not shown here. The upper levels are always weaker in the summer.
So here are the 500 MB anomalies for Harvey, which my company 5 days away was outlining this scenario (when you are labeled a denier, no one will ever bring it up).
Aug 6 with Debby
Hurricane Carol milled around for 2-3 days before running to New England again, right in those horse latitudes around between 27 and 33 north
upper air anomalies
All of them have strong TROUGHS going by to the north, which are weakening the winds, not a build-up of heat. The interaction of these troughs is crucial. You may see it next week near the Bahamas again.
Look at how slow that was, but at that time, it was not near land. So, no big deal. But I can name countless storms that are not brought up here through the years.
In the past, the person who wrote this would always ask for an opinion. But this is a one-sided, phony climate war agenda-driven piece. It is a weaponization of a current event with no perspective on the mountains of information that can offer a counter.
I would have been more than happy to provide some balance here, but the meteo-misinformation media is all in on the phony climate war now, so I understand why the oldest private-sector hurricane forecast on the planet is not asked. Might know too much about the past.
The counter list of slow-moving hurricanes before this started being pushed is endless. Too long for this piece but certainly a counter to the tone of the Bloomberg piece.