Thank God. Finally some sanity. Great post
You're welcome! I agree. Have you seen this link, yet? It's pretty interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
[HUGE SNIPS]
At 5:00 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) on August 27, Katrina's pressure dropped to 945 mbar and it was upgraded to Category 3. The same day President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, two days before the hurricane made landfall [5].
At 12:40 a.m. CDT (0540 UTC) on August 28, Katrina was upgraded to Category 4. Later that morning, Katrina went through a period of rapid intensification, with its maximum sustained winds reaching as high as 175 mph (280 km/h) (well above the Category 5 threshold of 156 mph (250 km/h)) and a pressure of 906 mbar by 1:00 p.m. CDT. By 4:00 p.m. CDT, Katrina reached its lowest pressure reading, at 902 mbar. This made Katrina the fourth most intense hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin, surpassing such Category 5 storms as Hurricane Ivan of 2004, Hurricane Mitch of 1998, and Hurricane Camille, the legendary hurricane that made landfall on the Mississippi coast in 1969. Katrina, however, encountered wind shear and drier air from a trough approaching from the west just before landfall, sparing the coast from a Category 5 hurricane. Nonetheless, the system made landfall as a strong Category 4 hurricane on 5:30 a.m. CDT (1030 UTC) August 29 at the mouth of the Mississippi with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph. Its lowest minimum pressure at landfall was 915 mb, making it the third strongest hurricane on record to make landfall on the United States.
[picture snipped] Click to see it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
Eye of Hurricane Katrina seen from a NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft. Image taken on August 28, 2005, before the storm made landfall.
A 15- to 30-foot storm surge came ashore on virtually the entire coastline from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to Florida. The 30-foot storm surge recorded at Biloxi, Mississippi is the highest ever observed in North America.