Free It's Raining Fish and Spiders by Bill Evans Page A

speed, strongest convection, eyewall characteristics, and so on. There was one little footnote at the end—something they almost never do: talk about how the ride went. The weather officer wrote that “though a rough ride, all managed to ‘stomach’ the trip.” All but one that is! I was glad he didn’t sell me out.
    As for Mitch, he went on to be one of the deadliest and most powerful hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin. At the time, Mitch was the fourth-most-intense hurricane in recorded history. It currently ranks seventh. Mitch dropped historic amounts of rainfall in Honduras and Nicaragua. Most official reports placed the rainfall at 3 feet. There were some unofficial reports of 75 inches!
    Deaths due to the catastrophic flooding and mudslides made Mitch the second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history; 11,000 people were killed and more than 8,000 were classified as missing. That’s a total somewhere in the neighborhood of 19,000 lives lost!
    After Honduras and Nicaragua, Mitch made a right turn back toward the Gulf of Mexico, brushing the north coast of the Yucatán, and making a bead for South Florida. Though by this time Mitch was losing strength, he still had some wallop left.
    With a 4-foot storm surge and sustained winds of 40 mph, Mitch dropped 7 to 10 inches of rain and five tornadoes on South Florida. Mitch destroyed 645 houses, injuring 65 people, and killing others who drowned when their boats capsized.
    Because of Mitch’s destruction in Central America and Florida, the World Meteorological Organization retired his name in the spring of 1999; it will never be used again for an Atlantic hurricane.
    This is Iceman, requesting permission to fly by the tower…
    Differences Between Hurricanes and Tornadoes
    While both hurricanes and tornadoes are atmospheric vortices (a vortex is a counterclockwise rotation of air), they have little in common. Tornadoes are produced from a single convective storm, as explained in the tornado section of this book, and most are no more than hundreds of feet wide. Hurricanes are made up of many convective storms and are hundreds of miles wide.
    Tornadoes are produced in regions of large temperature gradient, meaning that it’s very hot at the surface of the land but changes gradually to very cold high in the atmosphere above. Hurricanes are generated in regions of near zero horizontal temperature gradient, meaning that the temperature is consistent throughout the air column.
    While some tornadoes form over water, the majority of tornadoes form over land; the sun’s heating of the earth’s surface usually contributes to the development of the thunderstorm that spawns the vortex. In contrast, hurricanes are purely oceanic phenomena. They die out over land due to losing their source of moisture—the ocean.
    Last, hurricanes take days to develop, do their destructive business, and disintegrate, while tornadoes typically last for only minutes.
    The Greatest Storm on Earth
    The most powerful storm ever recorded on the Earth’s surface—since we’ve been able to keep track of these things—was Super Typhoon Tip, which formed in the western Pacific Ocean on October 5, 1979. Between classes—I was in college at the time, attending Mississippi State University—I watched the reports of this storm as closely as I could.
    Slow to develop and exceedingly erratic in its early movement, Tip eventually grew into a monster storm with a cloud formation of 1,350 miles in diameter. If the storm had been centered in the Gulf of Mexico, it would have stretched from Miami, Florida, to Amarillo, Texas.
    Dude, that is huge !
    Tip’s gale-force winds extended out from its eye for a radius of 683 miles, about five times greater than a typical Atlantic hurricane. At its peak on October 12, the air pressure in the eye fell to 870 millibars (25.69 inches of mercury), the lowest ever measured at sea on the planet. This is