Here’s what you need to know:
Hurricane Laura could become a major Category 3 storm.
Laura strengthened from a tropical storm into a Category 1 hurricane on Tuesday morning as it cut through the Gulf of Mexico on a path toward the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, where officials have told more than 500,000 people to evacuate before landfall, which is expected early Thursday.
Forecasters said that Laura could become a major Category 3 hurricane late Wednesday as it gathers energy from the Gulf’s warm waters. Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana compared the storm to Hurricane Rita, which caused an estimated $25.2 billion in damage when it struck the state’s coast in 2005.
The region had been on alert for a “one-two punch” of back-to-back hurricanes that meteorologists had warned might pummel Louisiana and Texas this week, but the first system to arrive, Tropical Storm Marco, significantly weakened before making landfall Monday evening.
Even as Marco crossed the coast, most eyes were already on Laura, which unleashed heavy rainfall across Cuba and Jamaica. The hurricane is expected to increase in strength, with hurricane conditions possible from San Luis Pass, Texas, which is south of Houston, to Intracoastal City, La., according to the National Hurricane Center’s Tuesday afternoon update.
Mr. Edwards expressed relief that Louisiana would not be walloped by two hurricanes within 48 hours — a rare occurrence that would have posed formidable challenges for even the most seasoned veterans of Gulf Coast storms. Still, a Category 3 storm by itself could cause major damage.
Marco was a Category 1 hurricane on Sunday, but it weakened into a tropical storm on Monday before making landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River around 6 p.m. local time. It dissipated into a tropical depression about three hours later.
“If I’ve got a message, it’s not to assume that Laura is going to do a similar favor” and lose steam the way Marco did, Mr. Edwards said.
Parts of Texas and Louisiana are evacuating before Laura arrives.
Mandatory evacuations have already begun throughout portions of Louisiana and Texas to prepare for Laura’s potential landfall in the United States.
The areas within the storm’s path that have ordered residents to leave include Port Arthur, Texas, which has the nation’s largest oil refinery, and Cameron Parish, La., just across the state line. Oil and gas companies have also evacuated workers from offshore production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
City and county officials in Texas have issued evacuation orders affecting hundreds of thousands of residents, particularly those living in low-lying areas. These orders, some of them voluntary, include parts of Orange, Jefferson and Chambers Counties, as well as Galveston, Texas, and the Texas A&M University campus in the city.
On Tuesday, Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official of Harris County, which includes Houston, issued a voluntary evacuation order for residents in coastal portions of the county bordering Galveston Bay, including Baytown, Seabrook, Nassau Bay, Friendswood, and parts of Pasadena and Clear Lake. South Houston was not included in the evacuation order, although Ms. Hidalgo initially mentioned it.
“Let me make this as clear as possible, all of us need to be prepared for the very real potential of a direct hit from this storm,” said Ms. Hidalgo, whose title is county judge. “This is truly when we have to say prepare for the worst.”
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas also mobilized more than 70 members of the Army and Air National Guards and the Texas State Guard to help local, state and federal officials with the storm response.
“Property and belongings can be restored, but lives cannot,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement on Monday. “I call on all Texans who may be in harm’s way to put their safety and their family’s lives above all else.”
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said in a statement that staff had begun evacuating several facilities on Monday. Prisoners and employees were transported with N-95 masks and personal protective equipment because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections has already moved more than 1,300 inmates.
Cameron Parish, in southwestern Louisiana, issued a mandatory evacuation order effective at 1 p.m. Monday. Portions of Jefferson, Lafourche and Plaquemines Parishes have also ordered residents to evacuate.
Cuba suffered damage, but no casualties were reported.
Tropical Storm Laura made landfall in western Cuba on Monday night, churning through the provinces of Artemisa and Pinar del Rio. Damage was being assessed Tuesday morning, but no casualties had been reported.
The storm tore through the eastern part of the island on Sunday night, stripping away tin roofs in Guantánamo province and collapsing a bridge in Granma province, before tracing the length of the island about 50 miles from the southern coast.
As the storm moved west, electricity was cut as a precaution to many provinces. Across Cuba’s southern coast, Laura toppled trees and telephone posts and downed power lines.
The island’s Civil Defense Force oversaw the evacuation of 334,000 people. Thousands were moved to emergency shelters, but most took refuge with relatives. Though clustering may cause a spike in coronavirus infection rates, authorities said they felt their primary duty was to protect people in coastal areas from the storm.
Laura tore through banana and coffee plantations in the eastern part of the island and damaged crops in the province of Artemisa, a major source of root vegetables for the capital. Food supplies in Cuba have been dicey in recent months: over the last two years, sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have blocked gasoline deliveries from the country’s main ally, Venezuela, leading to a decrease in domestic food production.
Although people in Havana had braced for a tough night, the eye of the storm passed more than 60 miles to the west. As electricity flickered back on Tuesday morning, people in the capital awoke to a rainbow.
Laura is being compared to Hurricane Rita, which struck the same region in 2005.
When Hurricane Laura comes ashore, Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana predicted on Monday, it could be similar in intensity to Hurricane Rita, which struck the Gulf Coast on a similar track about a month after Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans in 2005.
Rita made landfall on Sept. 24, 2005, as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 120 miles an hour. It spawned an estimated 90 tornadoes as it pummeled Louisiana, Mississippi and eastern Texas, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm dumped as much as 15 inches of rain in some areas, and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. Storm-surge flooding swept as far east as the Florida Keys.
Rita was the third hurricane to reach Category 5 strength during the deadly and destructive 2005 storm season. It caused an estimated $10 billion in damage in the United States, according to the hurricane center; it killed at least seven people directly, with another 55 deaths attributed indirectly to the storm, including a bus accident during the evacuation in the Texas.
More than three million people tried to flee the Houston area and other parts of coastal Texas during a chaotic evacuation that choked major highways and stranded people in their cars. The evacuation become a case study for what to avoid in storm planning and hurricane response.
Laura was also approaching the coast on the anniversary of another major Houston-area storm, Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in Texas on Aug. 25, 2017.
Hurricane forecasters expect ‘one of the most active seasons on record,’ with as many as 25 named storms.
After a record number of tropical storms formed in the Atlantic Ocean in June and July, with five striking the United States, government scientists updated their forecast for the remainder of the hurricane season, saying it was likely to be extremely busy.
“It’s shaping up to be one of the most active seasons on record,” Louis W. Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service, said on Aug. 6.
Gerry Bell, the lead hurricane season forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said there could be 19 to 25 named storms — those with sustained winds above 38 miles an hour, or 61 kilometers an hour — before the season ends on Nov. 30.
Of those, seven to 11 could be hurricanes, with sustained winds of 74 m.p.h. or higher, including three to six major ones.
“We’ve never forecast up to 25 named storms before,” Dr. Bell said.
Even so, he said, it was unlikely that the 2020 season would be as active as 2005, when there were 28 named Atlantic storms and the Weather Service had to resort to using the Greek alphabet to name the last few.
Typically about 95 percent of named Atlantic storms occur between mid-August and the end of October, the period when ocean temperatures reach their peak and atmospheric conditions off the coast of Africa favor storm formation.
Laura is the 12th named storm of the 2020 season, and Marco the 13th, though Marco reached the U.S. mainland ahead of Laura.
Does global warming create more hurricanes in the Atlantic?
Adam Sobel is an atmospheric scientist and the director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia University.
While there is considerable support that warming oceans are making the hurricanes that do occur produce more rain, stronger winds and worse coastal flooding, it has not been clear that it is producing more storms.
Decades ago, we used to think a hotter planet should have more hurricanes because storms like warm ocean water. It turns out it is not that simple. Hurricanes form over the warmest waters on the planet, but as the entire ocean warms, the sea surface temperature threshold needed for storms to form also rises.
That is for the planet as a whole. But the Atlantic Ocean is a special case, both because some of us live near it, and because its climate has some unique features.
The Atlantic has experienced large swings in hurricane activity: The 1950s and 1960s were very active, then the 1970s and 1980s were quiet, and then things picked up again. Those have historically been viewed as natural cycles, implying that we could expect the relatively active period we are in to eventually end.
But there is increasing evidence that the quiet decades were caused by aerosol pollution — tiny particles originating from sulfur out of American and European smokestacks that cooled the ocean by reflecting sunlight. That pollution has been reduced by environmental regulation, and with increased greenhouse gases warming the Atlantic, returning to a low-hurricane period may be less likely.
The Atlantic is also influenced by the Pacific Ocean. Atlantic hurricanes tend to be suppressed in El Niño years and active in La Niña because of how those Pacific phenomena affect the jet stream.
Climate models have predicted that our warmer future will on average see an El Niño Pacific more often, giving us a reason to predict fewer Atlantic hurricanes. New research by some of my colleagues, though, has made a persuasive case that the models are wrong, despite their consistent predictions for the Pacific.
If so, our expectations for the future of Atlantic hurricanes may have been far too sanguine.
Reporting was contributed by Ed Augustin, Henry Fountain, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, David Montgomery, Christina Morales, Campbell Robertson and Rick Rojas.
August 26, 2020 at 03:26AM
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