“Not many people have satellite images in their room.”
But Grace Williams does. A giant satellite image of Hurricane Katrina hangs above her bed, a gift from her father in the weeks leading up to her senior year at Mississippi State University.
“He wanted it to be kind of a symbol of where I started,” said Williams, a New Orleans native. “So I have the satellite image of Katrina making landfall.”
Williams is set to graduate in May with her bachelor’s degree in geoscience with a focus on broadcast meteorology and hopes of returning to New Orleans afterward to work as a meteorologist.
The career choice, she said, was directly influenced by the impact Katrina had on her hometown, even though she was only 2 years old when it happened.
“I obviously don’t remember too much since I was so little, but even though I can’t remember exact details, it was always something that was pretty present in my life, I would say, and constantly told in my community and taught in school,” Williams told The Dispatch.
Taylor Hunn, another New Orleans native set to graduate from MSU with a professional meteorology concentration in May, had a similar experience, having just turned 1 when her family had to evacuate from Katrina.
“I’ve known about Katrina ever since I can remember things just from the amount that I’ve been told (about it),” Hunn said. “We have picture books in our house of damage, of what our old house used to look like. Our house was completely destroyed by Katrina, from what I’ve heard.
Both women grew up seeing the scars Katrina left on their hometown, driving through areas in the city that were never rehabilitated after the storm, left to decay for 20 years.
“I used to always see the houses with … the spray paint (telling) how many dead bodies there are in the house or who lived here and whatnot,” Hunn said. “… When I was finally able to understand those are houses that are still here from Katrina … I think that really shifted my outlook on how Katrina really affected New Orleans.”
Despite not remembering the event, both Hunn and Williams said the storm influenced them to pursue meteorology in hopes of understanding the scientific side of the event as well as they already understand the human impact side.
“I love looking at models and forecasting, and that’s one of my favorite things to do at school,” Williams said. “But the real reason I wanted to study weather is because I saw the human aspect, the families and the preparation that goes into storms and the recovery, how long it can last.”
Katrina left widespread destruction across much of the Gulf Coast, damaging much of south Mississippi and displacing millions from the coast. In the decades since, climate scientists and meteorologists have studied the conditions that made the storm so intense.
A perfect storm
Meteorologists began warning the public about Katrina weeks in advance. The storm first made landfall Aug. 25 as a Category 1 hurricane near Miami-Dade County, Florida, according to the National Weather Service.
Johna Rudzin, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at MSU, was a teenager in the Florida Keys at the time. While her area hadn’t experienced much damage from Katrina, the storm has been a defining example in her career field since.
“Of all the Gulf hurricanes, Katrina is definitely like the one that’s always mentioned … as far as the epitome of hurricane, ocean, loop current interaction,” Rudzin told The Dispatch.
Those factors, Rudzin said, all played into the intensity of Katrina, bringing together a number of circumstances perfectly aligned to create a devastating storm.
Hurricanes begin as tropical storms over the ocean, fueled by atmospheric conditions and warm air rising from the water. The Gulf waters in August 2005 provided an abundant heat source as Katrina formed, Rudzin said, while an anticyclone – a high-pressure system – above the storm allowed the winds to circulate more efficiently in the same direction, keeping the storm vertical and helping it intensify.
As the storm moved through the Gulf, its track shifted slightly westward toward Louisiana and Mississippi, guided by atmospheric patterns and warm water.
“It’s very common for storms to undergo what is known as eyewall replacement cycles. They get very intense, and then the inner core kind of falls apart and then reorganizes,” Rudzin said. “That’s why Katrina weakened some before the storm made landfall. But when it does that, it also expands the wind field.”
The wind field, or the area encompassing the winds around the storm’s center, significantly expanded, and Katrina doubled in size, with tropical storm-force winds extending up to about 140 nautical miles from the storm’s center.
Katrina went from a Category 3 hurricane to a Category 5 – the highest intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale – in less than 12 hours, reaching an intensity of 167 mph by the morning of Aug. 28, hitting its peak at 173 mph later that afternoon. The hurricane made its final landfall near the mouth of the Pearl River at the Mississippi/Louisiana border with an estimated intensity of 121 mph – a Category 3 storm.
Counties in southeastern and east central Mississippi bore the brunt of the storm. Millions of trees and power lines were downed, roofs were damaged and the timber and agricultural industries suffered lasting losses. The heavy rainfall, flooding and 12 tornadoes that the storm produced exacerbated the damage, according to NWS.
Research continues
By 1 p.m. on Aug. 29, Katrina had weakened to Category 1 after moving inland over southern and central Mississippi. It weakened to a tropical storm about six hours later and eventually dissipated over the Great Lakes, according to NWS.
“Hurricanes develop and intensify because they’re getting moisture and heat extracted from the ocean,” Rudzin said. “(If the storm only has) a very dry land, it doesn’t have that anymore, and so the surface roughness and then the lack of a heat source (weakens the storm).”
It was a combination of circumstances that aligned to create one of the most intense, heavily studied storms in U.S. history, Rudzin said.
With atmospheric and ocean conditions ever changing, it’s hard to compare storms year-by-year, she said. Rudzin said climate scientists and meteorologists are split on whether climate change has a direct or measurable effect on the intensity of hurricanes out of the Gulf today.
“The intricacies of how anthropogenic or human-caused climate change influences the atmosphere and then how those changes in the atmosphere influence intensity and frequency is still a very active research topic,” Rudzin said. “It’s kind of depending on who you ask and how you ask. To me, I think it’s still an active research topic that is progressing.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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