Kevin's Blog

At 4pm CDT, dangerous Category 2 Hurricane Ike is battering the Texas and Louisiana coastlines with waves and winds, even though the center of the storm is still 8 hours from making landfall. Maximum sustained winds are 105mph, and an oil rig near the center of the storm reported sustained winds of 125mph at a height of 400 feet.

Because Ike is such a large storm, hurricane storm surge is already on the increase, waves have been surging over the Galveston seawall all day, and hurricane force winds will reach the coast by 7pm evening, some six hours before landfall.

Many of you are probably asking, how can a Category 2 storm look, feel, and create damage like Category 4 or 5-type storm?

Engineer Herbert Saffir and Hurricane Center Director Bob Simpson developed the scale that is used for hurricane classification in 1969. The Saffir-Simpson scale was designed at the request of the United Nations to aid in the evaluation of structural damage of homes and buildings by the winds in a hurricane. The scale was not developed to address minimum central pressure, storm surge, the size of the storm, the forward speed of the storm, the amount of rainfall, flooding, etc.

That brings us to Ike! The hurricane community recognizes that we need to try to develop a classification scheme that takes into account all of the potential hazards a hurricane brings, and is easily communicable to the public at risk. Dr. Mark Powell at NOAA's Hurricane Research Division and Timothy Reinhold with the Institute for Business and Home Safety may have a solution. They developed a metric called Integrated Kinetic Energy, aptly named "IKE", to assess the destructive potential of a hurricane.

This quantity takes into account the wind speeds and the size of the storm, and how these factors create storm surge. The IKE scale varies from 1-6, with 6 being the worst. How do previous storms stack up? Hurricane Katrina at its worst as well as the destructive Hurricane Wilma both topped out at a 5.1 on the IKE scale.

What is Hurricane Ike at the moment? Also a 5.1!

The image below is a depiction of the wind field around Hurricane Ike. Note the large area of hurricane force winds (yellow, orange, reds) just offshore. As a result, the storm surge at landfall will likely break the Texas coast record of 22 feet that Carla brought to Port Lavaca in 1961.

Unfortunately for our friends on the Upper Texas Coast, Ike looks to be getting more organized as it nears the shore. The radar depiction of the storm indicates that an inner eye wall may be forming. If that happens, the destructive power of Ike could increase. There are also tornado warnings in effect for Louisiana in the outer bands of storms that have already come onshore.

Tides at Pleasure Pier in Galveston are now at 9 feet above normal, even with astronomical low tide coming in the next few hours. To add insult to injury, landfall of Ike should occur near astronomical high tide at Galveston just after midnight.

Keep your browser on Fox Weather for the latest updates. If you have any questions about Ike and its impacts, ask here! We will be available to answer your questions all weekend!