Mapping Ike's Impact – Storm Surge and Wind Speed

Raj has been burning the midnight oil running through the latest storm surge and wind speed data coming out of NOAA for Ike. I think the maps tell the story the best so I’ll get right to them:

Before the Storm Surge

This map shows the path of Ike in relation to population, which is indicated by the height of the 3D extruded polygons for metropolitan areas with more than 25,000 people. The map also shows oil and gas pipelines and platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

After the Storm Surge

This is the same map with the predicted storm surge for Ike along the Gulf Coast. The data comes from National Hurricane Center’s SLOSH model (Sea Lake and Over the Land Surge model). The output of the model shows the probability of a five foot or more storm surge above the normal tide levels in the affected area. National Hurricane Center issues these forecasts in shapefile format every 6 hours (the latest was for 18:00 hrs, valid for next several days, issued at 17:00).

For this map Raj deleted polygons with probability of less than 10. So the shades of blue (from light to dark blue) show increasing probability (from 10% to 100%) of an area getting storm surge of five ft or more above the regular tide level for that area.

This can be seen even more clearly when we zoom into some of most populous regions starting with Houston:

Before the Storm Surge

After the Storm Surge

This map has the same symbology as the Gulf Coast map and really shows the potential power of the storm. We are not sure if the SLOSH model includes the Galveston storm wall, but based on the results we are assuming it does not.

Next we will take a look at New Orleans:

Before the Storm Surge

After the Storm Surge

Even though Louisiana is far from the eye of the storm it looks like it’s low laying coastal areas can expect a decent sized storm surge. This further reinforces the predictions of Ike being a very large storm.

Lastly we will take a look at a map of wind speed and wind direction along the path of the storm going inland to Texas.

The data for the map comes from NOAA’S NDFD forecast. This map shows a 3d perspective, looking south-south-east direction, for wind speed and direction around the time Ike is making a landfall (+/- 1 hour) . The colors indicate intensity of wind speed from 5 miles (dark green), 25+ miles (lighter shades of green), 40+ miles (lighter tan/brown) to 55+ miles (dark brown). The height shows wind direction relative to Ike’s movement, the maximum twist is to the right. It is interesting to see the gyration effect of the wind direction seen in the height and wind speed seen in the coloration. The arm swinging to the south seems to have the more direct wind sheer.

All the data for these maps are in the process of being uploaded to Finder!. You can find these data sets and many others through the “Ike” tag.