The Colombian beach resort facing a ‘public calamity’
– the Guardian
Excerpt:
In the past 10 years, Palomino’s coastline has receded between 47 and 50 metres, threatening the livelihoods of restaurateurs, hoteliers and all those who work in the resort
Excerpt:
A rapid analysis of rainfall trends and Gulf of Mexico temperatures shows many similarities to Hurricane Helene less than two weeks earlier.
A preliminary analysis from the team of scientists at World Weather Attribution indicates the rainfall from Hurricane Milton across Florida was 20 percent to 30 percent heavier and rainfall intensity was about twice as likely as it would have been in the climate of the late 19th century.
Similarly, climate change is responsible for a 40 percent increase in the intensity of storms like Milton, located in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near the Florida coast, the analysis found. Effectively, Milton would have made landfall as a Category 2 storm in an earlier climate. Instead, it came onshore Wednesday night near Siesta Key south of Sarasota as a Category 3.
Like Hurricane Helene 12 days earlier, Milton met the scientific criteria for rapid intensification—an increase in maximum wind speed of 35 miles per hour in 24 hours. But Milton intensified at a truly staggering rate while over the southern Gulf of Mexico, 95 miles per hour in 24 hours. Only two other storms—Wilma (2005) and Felix (2007)—intensified faster in the Atlantic basin, the area that includes the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and open Atlantic Ocean.
This extreme rapid intensification is projected to happen more often in today’s modern, warming climate…
Beaches | Coasts of the Month . . .
Photos of the Month . . .
“The arts was and continues to be a magnet for my mind and soul, and it was so obvious to me that life without the arts would just be flat,” – Oleg Guerrand-Hermès
Cultured (10-27-2023)
Question its future
Excerpt:
Two back-to-back destructive storms make some ponder the burden of the barrier island’s beauty. Will they rebuild again or give in to climate change?
Dozens of piles of soggy furniture and other debris, coated in sand this week by Hurricane Milton, marked the homes that had flooded last month during Hurricane Helene. Most of those were older, single-story homes on the gulf side, but there was debris outside the Spanish-tiled villas on the other side of the road, too. Earth movers struggled to reconstruct a temporary road installed after Helene.
Massive pines, palms and other tropical trees that made up the key’s lush canopy had toppled in high winds. Underground power lines poked from the sand.
“We had just put everything back together,” he said. But now, “the island is unrecognizable…”