THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
hurricane dorian
BY SUSAN SVRLUGAMore than a week ago, Randell
Barry began seeing indications
that a powerful storm might af-
fect Daytona Beach, Fla. He alert-
ed colleagues at Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University: Might
need to move the planes.
In the days that followed, he
and other faculty members in the
meteorology department helped
school officials plan for Hurricane
Dorian, trying to gauge the
storm’s p ath, strength and timing.
Like just about everyone else in
Florida, Barry kept his eye on the
storm, with all its unknowns. Like
every university bracing in the
hurricane’s path, Embry-Riddle
faced a host of logistical challeng-
es at its Daytona Beach campus.
Administrators needed to ensure
students and staff members were
safe, that buildings were secure,
that parents were informed.
And they wanted to get their
fleet of 68 planes — some of which
cost about $800,000 e ach — out of
town.
“It’s pretty amazing to watch it,”
P. Barry Butler, the school’s presi-
dent, said Tuesday of the school’s
formidable hurricane planning,
honed over many years. Since
2017, the school also has asked
students, including incoming
freshmen, to have their own plan
— to prepare in advance for the
campus possibly having to evacu-
ate. On Friday, c ampus shut down.
Barry and other experts were
consulting with campus safety of-
ficials, giving them estimated
wind speeds in 12 hours, 24 hours
and so on. High winds are the
biggest concern, Barry said, “but
you want to get those aircraft out
of our area before the outer rain
bands of the storm start moving
in.” That means the flight depart-
ment needs a longer lead time
than local emergency officials. It
also brings a risk of moving the
planes too early; if the storm’s
path changes, the school could
waste money on an unnecessary
evacuation.
About 150 people worked on
the planes’ departure, Butler said,
including people brewing coffee
and cooking food f or the pilots. At
4:45 a.m. Saturday, the planes
began to lift off, o ne after another,
every three to four minutes.
The pilots flew to Alabama,
part of a longtime agreement w ith
Auburn University. On the radar,
it looks like a railroad track from
Daytona to Auburn, and on the
ground, there’s extensive coordi-
nation with the Federal Aviation
Administration.
Safety officials followed the
pl aybook, locking things down.
The 1,300 faculty and staff mem-
bers had been given time to take
care of things at home. With stu-
dents from 50 states and 110 coun-
tries — including the Bahamas,
where Dorian unleashed devasta-
tion — not everyone’s plan
worked.
By Sunday morning, about 100
students were left on the Daytona
Beach campus. School officials
asked faculty and staff to take
students in; two moved in with
Butler. That l eft about 30 students
with nowhere to go. Five studentsvolunteered to be shelter cap-
tains, helping others move into a
local middle-school cafeteria
Monday, buying flashlights and
batteries, trying to reassure those
scared about the storm.
Only one problem: The shelter
couldn’t take one student’s dog,
Jasper, without a crate.
School officials rushed to buy a
crate. Jasper and the group
moved in.
“We’re as prepared as we can
be,” Butler said Tuesday night.
“I’m watching the palm trees out
back start to sway.”
At the shelter, students played
soccer outside before the rains
began, did homework and talked
with local residents in the caf-
eteria after the storm hit. Josiah
Bichler, a senior who volunteered
to help rather than going home to
Sarasota, Fla., was surprised at
how happy the other people were
to see Embry-Riddle students
there. “That was definitely a neat
experience.”
One thing they didn’t do much
of: sleep.
“There was a lot of snoring,”
Bichler said.
On Wednesday, school officials
were working to ensure the cam-
pus would be safe for classes Mon-
day. D orian p assed 85 miles out to
sea, and damage seemed limited
to landscaping. Dorms were ex-
pected to reopen Wednesday eve-
ning, but other buildings re-
mained closed.
Barry has been working with
university o fficials on storm plans
for 15 years. It doesn’t get any
easier, he said. Weather is just too
uncertain.
On Thursday, they hope, they
can fly those planes back.
[email protected]Airplanes part of school’s evacuation
Aeronautical university
in Florida relocates fleet
to wait out the stormBY SARAH KAPLANThe science connecting cli-
mate change to hurricanes like
Dorian is strong. Warmer oceans
fuel more extreme storms; rising
sea levels bolster storm surges
and lead to worse floods. Just this
summer, after analyzing more
than 70 years of Atlantic hurri-
cane data, NASA scientist Tim
Hall reported that storms have
become much more likely to
“stall” over land, prolonging the
time when a community is sub-
jected to devastating winds and
drenching rain.
But none of the numbers in his
spreadsheets could prepare Hall
for the image on his computer
screen this week: Dorian swirling
as a Category 5 storm, monstrous
and nearly motionless, above the
islands of Great Abaco and Grand
Bahama.
Seeing it “just spinning there,
spinning there, spinning there ,
over the same spot,” Hall said,
“you can’t help but be awestruck
to the point of speechlessness.”
After pulverizing the Bahamas
for more than 40 hours, Dorian
finally swerved north Tuesday as
a Category 2 storm. It is expected
to skirt the coasts of Florida and
Georgia before striking land
again in the Carolinas, where it
could deliver more life-threaten-
ing wind, storm surge and rain.
“Simply unbelievable,” t weeted
Marshall Shepherd, an atmos-
pheric scientist at the University
of Georgia and former president
of the American Meteorological
Society. “I feel nausea over this,
and I only get that feeling with a
few storms.”
The hurricane has matched or
broken records for its intensity
and for its creeping pace over the
Bahamas. But it also fits a trend:
Dorian’s appearance made 2019
the fourth straight year in which
a Category 5 hurricane formed in
the Atlantic — the longest such
streak on record.
Shocking though the storm has
been, meteorologists and climate
scientists say it bears hallmarks
of what hurricanes will increas-
ingly look like as the climate
warms.
Dorian’s rapid intensification
over the weekend was unprec-
edented for a hurricane that was
already so strong. In the space of
nine hours Sunday, its peak
winds increased from 150 mph to
180 mph. By the time the storm
made landfall, its sustained
winds of 185 mph were tied for
strongest ever observed in the
Atlantic.
The link between rapid inten-
sification and climate change is
robust, said Jennifer Francis, an
atmospheric scientist at Woods
Hole Research Center. Heat i n the
ocean is a hurricane’s primary
source of fuel, and the world’s
oceans have absorbed more than
90 percent of the warming of the
past 50 years, according to the
National Oceanic and Atmos-
pheric Administration.
The water that Dorian devel-
oped over was about 1 degree
Celsius warmer than normal,
Francis said: “That translates to a
whole bunch of energy.”
Because warm air can hold
more moisture, climate change
has increased the amount of wa-
ter vapor in the atmosphere, lead-
ing to wetter hurricanes that
unleash more extreme rainfall.
The warm, wet air also gives
further fuel to a growing storm.
“When that water vapor con-
denses into cloud droplets, it
releases a lot of heat into the
atmosphere and that’s what a
hurricane feeds off of,” Francis
said. “These factors are very
clearly contributing to the storms
we’ve been seeing lately.”
Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in
the North Atlantic could become
nearly twice as common over the
next century as a result of climate
change, even as the total number
of storms declines.
Once a hurricane makes land-
fall, the sea level rise created by
global warming can amplify
storm surge. The higher the water
level, the worse floods will be
once a storm arrives — and global
sea levels are predicted to rise by
about a meter by the end of the
century.
Hurricane Dorian was particu-
larly devastating because of the
way it lingered over the Bahamas.
Such “stalling” events have be-
come far more common, said
Hall, who is a senior scientist at
NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies.
In a study published in the
journal Climate and AtmosphericScience in July, Hall found that
North Atlantic hurricanes have
slowed about 17 percent since
1944; annual coastal rainfall av-
erages from hurricanes increased
by about 40 percent over the
same period. A 2018 paper found
that tropical cyclones worldwide
have slowed significantly.
In stalling events, “you have
longer time for the wind to build
up that wall of water for the surge
and you just get more and more
accumulated rain on the same
region,” Hall said.
“That was the catastrophe of
Harvey,” he added, referring to
the hurricane that dumped more
than five feet of rain over Te xas in- Hurricanes Dorian and
Florence, the latter of which del-
uged the Carolinas last year, also
fit this pattern.
Hurricanes are steered across
the Earth’s surface by large-scale
atmospheric winds, like corks
bobbing in a turbulent stream. A
hurricane can get caught in an
eddy and “stagnate,” Hall said.
Climate simulations have shown
that atmospheric winds in the
subtropics, where Dorian is, are
slowing down — making these
types of eddies more likely.
Such stalling events make hur-
ricanes more difficult to track.
Without a large-scale wind to
propel them, the storms are buf-
feted by small fluctuations that
are harder to forecast.
Both Hall and Francis cau-
tioned that scientists can’t attri-
bute any single weather disaster
to climate change — especially
not while that disaster is unfold-
ing. What researchers can do is
evaluate how much worse the
disaster was made as a result of
human-caused warming, and
how likely it is that this type of
disaster will occur again.
When it comes to Dorian, Hall
said, the answers to both those
questions are grim.
“This is what we expect more
of,” he said. But he doesn’t think
he’ll ever get used to seeing it.
[email protected]
Slow, intense and unrelenting:
The science behind the storm
While Dorian has hit
record marks, it also fits
a trend in the AtlanticSource: National Hurricane Center TIM MEKO/THE WASHINGTON POSTMiamiNassauJacksonvilleOrlandoTropical storm
39-73 mphHurricane
74 + mphPath (^) of D
orian
Daytona
Beach
Freeport
Sept. 1
Aug. 31
Sept. 3
B
A
H
A
M
AS
Abaco
Islands
Grand
Bahama
Island
Atlantic Ocean
FLORIDA
Wind strength recorded in 12-hour increments
Aug. 31 to Sept. 3
Sept. 2
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