The Weather Notebook

…Hurricane names retired: Gustav, Ike and Paloma have been retired from the list of tropical cyclone names for the Atlantic. Gustav caused serious damage in Louisiana. Ike was a huge hurricane that brought tremendous devastation to the Texas coast. Paloma caused significant damage in the Caymans and Cuba. Alma was retired from the Pacific list.

…Steve Lyons, the Hurricane Expert at The Weather Channel, blogged this week about the dangerous situation in Florida where the state run hurricane insurance program could be put in the position of needing a huge Federal bailout if there is a catastrophic hurricane loss. He pointed to the important of mitigation in reducing future losses.

…An 8th grade class in Houston recently won a contest that called for an improved hurricane rating scale. The SAFE Scale ranks storms on a scale of 1-20, based on the Storm surge, Anticipated rainfall, Force of winds and Expanse of the storm.

…The new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium has a problem. The opening homestand there has featured a tremendous number of home runs, especially to right field. There is already talk that the stadium is a bandbox, perhaps the Coors Field of the East Coast. Our friends at Accu-Weather did a study that says that the stadium may have been constructed in such a way that its shape creates wind currents that have resulted in the abundance of home runs. They did say that the wind tunnel effect may be limited to the spring and fall.

…An unprecedented $10.5 million dollar effort to understand tornadoes will send dozens of scientists into the field May 10 to June 13. Verification Of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment 2 (VORTEX2) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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