Acapulco has been utterly destroyed

[noblegiraffe]

The videos and photos coming out are absolutely horrendous.

Acapulco, Mexico, was directly hit by Category 5 Hurricane Otis yesterday morning. Shockingly, the computer models all failed. They all said it would be a normal tropical storm, so when it rapidly intensified, there was basically no time to prepare or evacuate.

I believe the highest level of storm that had hit the area previously was a category 3.

So unprecedented storm strength with rapid intensification and a total failure to predict it happening.

And yet....not news? A minor mention on the BBC front page. The Daily Mail which normally loves pictures of extreme weather has it well down the page after Sarah Beeney's marriage.

https://x.com/leonsimons8/status/1717449479639462138?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g

More video from the air https://x.com/volcaholic1/status/1717682088516747607?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g

Looks like all the hotels on the seafront are devastated. In an area that relies on tourism this will have a huge impact.

No pictures of the poorer areas as all lines of communication are down.

https://x.com/lauragelezunas/status/1717792196961919315?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g this suggests it could be two months before water and electricity are back on.

So unprecedented storm strength with rapid intensification and a total failure to predict it happening.

Unfortunately, computer models often don't deal well with unprecedented events. We might hope that climate models somehow incorporate extrapolation to more severe conditions than have ever been previously observed but I don't know if that's the case or not.
Maybe @OhYouBadBadKitten may be able to shed some light?

I saw this on the news yesterday and was shocked at the devastation. Agree, there is not much being said about it, but the news is dominated by Gaza right now. It being low down on the DM is because of the amount of clicks it is receiving.

I hadn't seen anything about this, how awful :-(

I have a passing interest in the weather, but I'm not strong on the science particularly. My understanding of weather predictions is that they use past weather to model probability in future weather and that this level of rapid escalation hasn't occurred before so couldn't have been predicted. The oceans are very much warmer than they have ever been on either side of the southern US and central America, so there is a probability that there will be further hard to predict, severe storms in the next few years.

It's terrible for Acapulco, I don't know that they would have been able to save the buildings with enough warning but they could potentially have evacuated and saved lives if they had know this was going to happen.

I like Ryan Hall Y'all for weather, he describes the science behind the weather quite well. He talks about hurricane Otis here.

It was on the news - I saw several items about it, mainly about the speed with which it blew up and struck, but also showing the aftermath. It looked horrifying.

I tend to follow hurricane news because we have family on the USA gulf coast and I've been horrified by what's happened in Acapulco. The sheer speed at which the winds intensified from a tropical storm to a Cat 5 is unbelievable. There has been far too little in the mainstream news about it.

Weather is not climate.

Weather is chaotic. Climate can be predicted.

They are also spelled differently. In theory they should be hard to confuse.

Yeah... I meant weather models. The question is whether they take into account the possibility of unprecedented weather systems, which are likely to arise because of climate change.

Storms are stronger because the ocean is warmer

How Climate Change May Be Impacting Storms Over Earth's Tropical Oceans – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (nasa.gov)

We are likely to see considerably more storm damage in the coming years

Not really sure it's that "unprecedented." Climate changes. That's what it does. That's why we are sill in a an interglacial period where there's ice at the poles.

Rather than arguing about the causes of climate change (which rather contains the grand assumption we can affect it), it would have been a lot better if we accepted it and prepared for it.

Rather than arguing about the causes of climate change

There are plenty who think that it isn't changing and will argue that any extreme weather we are experiencing is perfectly normal.

This event is chilling, not only because of the severity but also because of our inability to predict it. Was it a one-off or are our models falling apart?

I wonder if because it wasn't expected the news outlets don't yet have many pictures and they can't sell a story without pictures....

It happened on Wednesday morning! They've had time to get pictures. There are videos all over twitter.

https://x.com/bmay/status/1717851083169575357?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g

Look at all the boats that have been destroyed, this one has affected rich people.

There are plenty who think that it isn't changing

Yes, there are some fucking thick people out there. Probably best avoided.

This year has been characterised by very strange weather around the globe. Apparently an underwater volcano erupted near Tonga last December and is believed to have had an influence on the climate

Here's how wrong the computer models were.

Apparently an underwater volcano erupted near Tonga last December and is believed to have had an influence on the climate

Only takes one, and no amount of tree-hugging vegan-spouting cycling and recycling will offset the emissions. Which is why I have long felt we should have been thinking about strategies to adapt to and cope with changes in climate.

My interest stems from archaeology, and learning that there are plenty of places - in Britain alone - that have clearly been so affected by changes in climate that they became uninhabitable. And thus abandoned. And in many cases never repopulated.

You would to be an complete and utter moron to try and deny that climate changes. Unless your take on mammoths is they are all hiding in a cave somewhere.

Climate changes. That's what it does. And within that change you get your day to day weather. And currently the relationship between the two is poorly understood and not likely to get any better.

Not really sure it's that "unprecedented." Climate changes. That's what it does. That's why we are sill in a an interglacial period where there's ice at the poles.

Rather than arguing about the causes of climate change (which rather contains the grand assumption we can affect it), it would have been a lot better if we accepted it and prepared for it.

I don't think anyone is arguing about climate change on this thread are they?

We are getting weather events which are unprecedented since records began. Computer models can only work with the data they're built on.
What I'm trying to get at is, are weather models built on historical data or is there any attempt to extrapolate to allow for more extreme weather systems than have appeared before, now that - regardless of the cause - there is global warming and more energy in the system overall.

I know a bit about computer modelling in a very different domain and tbh I'm not at all surprised that models don't do a good job of prediction of a chaotic system if reality is changing relative to what the models are built on.