Bieli Rocks on the eastern side of Sitka Sound, Alaska. The rocks have many moods. Rather the weather is moody, changing quickly, and them making the rocks appear completely changed.
Mount Edgecumbe on Kruzof Island is the snow-capped peak in the background. The mountain is a dormant volcano.
These are some of my favorite shots of the rocks on summer afternoons.
There is almost always one eagle on the rocks or crosses.
The rocks are far bigger and the wave action far more active that it appears in the close-up images. It is difficult to get closer than 100 yards to the rocks due to wind/wave motion. 300 mm lens brings the crosses in close and clear.
Here three different shots as a large eagle turns his head from one side to another.
Saying goodbye to the rocks for this summer.
We'll be back next year.
We've Read:
Harvey slams ashore as Cat 4 just north of Corpus Christi, Texas
Hurricane Harvey has brought “500-year” rainfall and flood conditions to the Houston area, according to officials at the Harris County Flood Control District.
By the time the storm finally leaves the Houston area the true magnitude may be even greater than that, surpassing 1,000-year thresholds -- potentially even more.
But 500-year floods, as it turns out, happen more frequently than you might expect. The Houston area alone has seen no fewer than three such events in the past three years, according to local officials: Memorial Day floods in 2015 and 2016, followed by Hurricane Harvey's torrential rainsthis year.
So is Houston just on a historically unlucky run of flooding, to be followed by a return to normal soon? Or was there some miscalculation of how frequently these massive flooding events occur? Or, most alarmingly, is something else happening that suggests these catastrophic weather events are becoming much more common?
A 500-year flood isn't necessarily something that happens once every five hundred years. Rather, a 500-year flood is an event that has a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in any given year. “For a 500-year flood, there is a 0.2 percent chance of having a flood of that magnitude occurring” in any given year, according to the National Weather Service.
Think of it as more a statistical term than a meteorological one. The probability that any extreme storm will happen is completely independent of the probability of the next one. “If one of those events occurs, it has no effect on future events occurring,” according to the National Weather Service. “In other words, if a 100-year flood event occurs, that does NOT mean that people are 'safe' for 99 years. The risk of having the flood in any given year is the same," regardless of whether it occurred recently. Ditto for 500-year floods.
Practically speaking, that means you can have multiple 500-year flood events happen essentially back-to-back. Indeed, that appears to be happening in Houston right now, with the flooding in 2015, 2016 and today.
Here's the other big caveat: The term is applied to a local area, not to the United States as a whole. So when meteorologists say the Houston is experiencing a 500-year flood, they mean there is a 1 in 500 chance of it happening in any given year in Houston.
The United States has 3.5 million miles of rivers and streams and 95,000 miles of shoreline, which means lots of potential for flooding — even flooding that's historic, by local or regional standards — in any given year. As it turns out, the country experiences multiple 500-year flood or storm events (that is to say, an event that in had a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in that given place) every single year. Including Harvey, the country has experienced at least 25 such 500-year rain events since 2010, according to the National Weather Service.
Before Harvey, the most recent one happened in Missouri in May, when some areas were soaked with a foot of rain in a few hours. Other recent 500-year rain events include Hurricane Matthew, which roared up the Carolinas last fall, and the torrential rain that destroyed much of Ellicott City, Md., last summer. Harvey will be at least the fifth major 500-year flood to hit Texas since 2010.
Here's a map of where some of the major ones have occurred since 2010, as compiled by the National Weather Service.
This brings us to another variable in the equation: Climate change.
It's unwise to try to link climate change to any specific storm or even string of storms. Even if we weren't heating the planet with a steady stream of human greenhouse gases, all of these storms would have likely happened anyway. But climate scientists do believe that global warming is creating conditions that allow these storms to become more powerful, and perhaps even more frequent.
Climatologists say the mechanism by which this is happening is fairly straightforward. “Warmer air can contain more water vapor than cooler air,” according to the 2014 Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government. “Global analyses show that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere has in fact increased due to human-caused warming. This extra moisture is available to storm systems, resulting in heavier rainfalls.”
That assessment includes this eye-opening chart on the rising prevalence of “heavy precipitation events” — defined in this case as five-year rain events, or events that have a 20 percent change of occurring in any given year.
This charts the number of these events in a given decade, relative to the average number for the period of 1900 to 1960. The 1990s saw 30 percent more of these heavy rainmakers than the typical decade between 1900 and 1960 did. In the 2000s there were 40 percent more of these events.
Terms like 100-year and 500-year began to be applied to floods with the creation of the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968. The program needed to identify which areas of the United States were at risk of flooding and which weren't. Floodplains came to be defined as land likely to flood during a 100-year rain event.
Climatologists base their estimates of 100-year and 1,000-year rainfall estimates based on a statistical analysis of prior years' rainfall data. The more data you have, the better your estimate is. Some places have more data available than others. As new data rolls in every year, estimates everywhere can be updated.
All of that is alarming news for residents of Houston, New Orleans and the millions of other people who live in areas vulnerable to extreme flooding. It cumulatively suggests that what we once projected would be extreme weather is more common than we thought and, as the climate cooks, is only getting more so.
The latest data we have on extreme precipitation events, through 2015, shows that the trends outlined above are likely to continue.
Texas' Congressional Delegation Voted Against Hurricane Relief for Hurricane Sandy. How Will They Justify Asking for $Billions Now?
Here's an Example:
“The problem with that particular bill is it became a $50 billion bill that was filled with unrelated pork. Two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.”
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), interview with NBC’s Katy Tur, Aug. 28, 2017
Hypocrisy watch! Now that Houston and much of southeastern Texas is swamped by Hurricane Harvey, critics (including Northeastern lawmakers) have complained that Texas senators and members of Congress are seeking emergency federal aid but refused to back relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The defense, as shown in the quote above by Cruz, is that the Sandy legislation was a bad bill, filled with pork-barrel projects. A similar defense is indicated by a spokesman for Cruz’s colleague, Sen. John Cornyn (R) — that he did vote for Sandy aid, just not the bad bill that was signed into law.
So what’s going on here? Did the bill for Sandy have so much pork in it that two-thirds was unrelated to the disaster at hand?
The Facts
Like many complex pieces of legislation, there were a number of votes and various versions of the emergency aid. The help for Sandy came in two parts — an uncontroversial vote in late 2012 for a $9.7 billion increase in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s borrowing power for flood relief, and then a $50.5 billion package that was approved in January 2013, without the votes of Texas Republicans (or many Republicans).
Many Republicans said that the emergency spending should have been offset by cuts elsewhere. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), at the time chairman of the Budget Committee, was one arguing the money needed to be offset. “This legislative abuse is an insult to families facing real emergencies in the wake of the storm,” he declared.
Many Republicans in the House voted for an alternative bill, crafted by Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), now President Trump’s budget director, that would have funded a smaller emergency bill with a 1.63 percent across-the-board reduction in spending on discretionary programs. “It’s so important to me that I think we should pay for it,” he said. But his gambit was rejected.
(AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan, did not directly respond to a question about whether Ryan would require funding for Harvey relief to be offset, as he had demanded in 2013. “We will help those affected by this terrible disaster,” she said. “The first step in that process is a formal request for resources from the administration.”)
So was the $50 billion bill filled with pork — two-thirds of which was unrelated to Sandy?
No.
The Congressional Research Service issued a comprehensive report on the provisions, and it’s clear that virtually all of it was related to the damage caused by Sandy. There may have been some pork in an earlier Senate version, but many of those items were removed before final passage. There were also some items that appear to have been misunderstood.
Cruz is repeating a number of myths about the funding for Sandy disaster relief. The vast majority of the spending was for Hurricane Sandy, including elements (such as Smithsonian repairs) that some lawmakers incorrectly believed were unrelated to the storm. The slow rate of projected spending that Cruz had criticized at the time was actually based on how quickly the government had spent funds after previous major storms.
Cruz clearly misspoke about the “two-thirds” being pork. Still, it is wildly incorrect to claim that the bill was “filled with unrelated pork.” The bill was largely aimed at dealing with Sandy, along with relatively minor items to address other or future disasters.
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