Project Katrina

A lot of the news reports I’ve seen are talking about Hurricane Ike as either a Cat 2 or 3 hurricane, but I think this is misleading. Instead it should be reported it as more like a tsunami 200 miles wide with hurricane force winds. According to Dr. Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog Ike is now stronger than Katrina and may strengthen more:

For example, Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi as a strong Category 3 hurricane, yet its storm surge was more characteristic of a Category 5 storm. Dr. Powell came up with a new scale to rate potential storm surge damage based on IKE (not to be confused with Hurricane Ike!) The new scale ranges from 1-6. Katrina and Wilma at their peaks both earned a 5.1 on this scale (Figure 2). At 12:30pm EDT [Thurs], Ike earned a 5.2 on this scale, the second highest kinetic energy of any Atlantic storm in the past 40 years. Hurricane Isabel of 2003 had the highest.