Sometimes knowing stuff can be depressing. I was looking at the hurricane tracker map for Gustav and I suddenly wondered what the storm surge pattern looked like. Conveniently there is map (scroll down). It doesn’t look good. I suspect that there are two factors at work here. Firstly hurricanes rotate counter-clockwise, which means you always get a bigger northward surge to the east of them than to the west. And secondly there are probably factors in the shape of the sea bottom up through the Breton Sound that funnels any surge coming into it. The net result is that while the eye of the hurricane might be coming ashore near Lafayette, the biggest rises in sea level will be near new Orleans.
Damn.
Update: rotation corrected as per George below.
Hi,
You said “Firstly hurricanes rotate clockwise”. Was that a slip of the fingers on the keyboard? Hurricanes, like every other low pressure system in the Northern hemisphere, rotate counter (or anti) clockwise.
This is one case when the Coriolis effect does come into play, unlike the case of water going down drains.
George
George:
Urk. Yes. The hurricane is pushing water from south to north on the east side. That’s counter-clockwise. Thanks!
PS – I have trouble with left and right as well.