Hurricane Katrina vs. Hurricane Helene

Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.
To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)
Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.
I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.
- What surprised me most about Helene was the ground speed. I don't remember seeing any hurricane make landfall in the US moving at over 20mph. As a casual observer I have anyways seen 12 mph as a quick storm and 6 mph as slow.
  
  Yeah, I’ve lived in New Orleans or on the East Coast my whole life and don’t recall that sort of movement speed. Usually, you want a fast moving storm so no one area takes on all the rain but Helene was going so fast and was so massive that it’s probably unprecedented.
- Helene is more deadly than Katrina if you don't count the deaths after the boat broke the levee that was well beyond its lifespan in New Orleans, which you shouldn't since that was a 100% fixable issue that was not taken care of.
  
  We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.
  
  What boat?

Good news! It's gonna get worse! Much, much worse! Say thank you to petrol states and companies, preferably by blowing up their infrastructure
- And a big thank you to politicians blocking major efforts to reduce carbon emissions thanks to lobbying by the industry and foreign governments.
  The world finally needs to stop politicans getting huge donations and hold them accountable for their actions.
  
  And also acting like "climate change" is a taboo topic that should never be spoken over the air, lest you offend someone.
  
  It boils my blood that Republicans would blame Democrats for not sending enough aide during these times, all the while Republicans vote against initiatives drafted up by Democrats to combat these issues specifically.
  They use issues like this entirely to rouse their base and keep their support.
  
  But they brought a snowball into Congress and everything so obviously climate change is fake news!
  Anything and everything for money... I wonder if they'll take cash in hell?
  
  Alright so we're going to change how we vote, right folks? Green New Deal or they are literally selling us out.
- You should read Ministry for the Future. It's about how people cope with the world after the effects of climate change get out of hand. It's sobering.
  The idea of just blowing up the offending petrol infrastructure made me think of it.

Are these pictures even on the same zoom level?
- You are correct, they don't appear to be. This one seems more accurate there, but the difference is still stark:
  
  I was going to correct you on the comparison and I tried making my own scaled image .... but I couldn't because yours is a correct scale
  I just couldn't believe that Helene was that massive and widespread compared to Katrina which was known as a major event. wow
  
  I did one too. Top and bottom before I saw yours. Here it is as well to help with the scale. I overlaid them in Photoshop to help get the land the same but hell its nuts.
- They are not, but I think the main focus is on how obscenely tall Helene was. There's many parts of the US that weren't prepared because they didn't think it would reach them
  
  There were warnings for Georgia and the southern Appalachia, but the storm moved so much faster at the end and carried so much water inland. The ability to hold more water in the atmosphere has been an ongoing concern from climate scientists, and this is a clear example of how it can lead to disaster.
  
  We even got some excessive wind in Chicagoland, which was obviously from the hurricane, because it was coming from the east. Normally, the wind here comes from the west.
  
  Wasn't a big part of Katrina's destruction from the hurricane effectively stalling over the southern US which caused prolonged and massive local damage?
  Not trying to discount either event, mostly worried about the time we get a stalled Helene sized hurricane
  
  It was ridiculously huge. I'm in Orlando, and when we were getting the first bands of wind, the eye of the storm was still over the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico

Well, it's not over.
This is coming next week. Path is unclear, and its not as big as Helene, but anything near a 930mb in Tampa Bay and plowing over Orlando at 950mb, especially at this angle, is a catastrophe.
Katrina was 920mb at landfall, and these intensity forecasts have been undershooting hurricanes recently.
And there's another low pressure system at the edge of the GFS that I don't like, taking a similar path to Helene:
This is what the upcoming hurricane looked like a few days ago.
- It's clearly trying to help the US by amputating the injured limb.
  
  Or take out Florida so it has a more open path to Texas.

I remember when conservatives were hooting and hollering about Climate Science Being Wrong, because the predicted "Worst hurricane season on record" wasn't producing a record number of powerful storms.
Well... now what? I guess we can fall back to Gaetz and DeSantis blaming Biden for a bad cleanup job. Or go the MTG approach and start talking about HARP and the Jewish Space Lasers.
- oh hey, all those east coasters can sell their worthless flooded houses to the west coast coasters selling their worthless burnt down houses fleeing the fires since no insurers will cover anywhere.
- Well... now what?
  Years went by and Earth-destroying profits continued for all these years, again.
  \ The goal was well defined, misinformation carefully funded, the results what they hoped for.
- They will probably say "it's just a hurricane, doesn't prove anything"
  
  Climate deniers can never be dissuaded from their idiot beliefs by science, because they are already ignoring science to these beliefs in the first place.
- Didn't you know those space lasers heated up the atmosphere just over Republican counties, to maximize the damage there?
  
  I would simply not live in a majority GOP county. Seems like they were victims of a personal choice.

As with everything, it also matters where it hits.
Katrina and New Orleans's levees was a big deal. Helene flooding areas many moles from the coast in high altitude areas.
There have been bigger hurricanes that do less damage and likely there will be future weaker ones that do more.
- I too worry about the poor moles getting flooded!!
- Mathew and Hugo were pretty horrific.

What I don't like about these graphics is there is no data source so you have to look it up to know how much to believe about what they say. So for those wondering, per Wikipedia:
Helene was a Cat 4, its max diameter was between 400-450 miles, max wind speed of 140 mph is correct. Known fatalities so far > 227 and counting.
Katrina was a Cat 5, 400 miles in diameter as shown, but with a max windspeed of 175 mph, not 125. For those too young to remember, Katrina was a very, very bad storm. So bad. Over 1392 fatalities (official estimate; exact number unknown). BTW Katrina also had a big tail/wing(?) stretching to the north when it hit land like what Helene had, but thinner since further west--but those don't count as part of the measured diameter of the hurricane.
My opinion of this graphic: Hurricanes are getting worse because of climate change, but we don't need to convince people of that by downplaying Katrina or making Helene look scarier--Helene is also very very bad. It's all bad, folks.
Katrina photo:
- Katrina was a man made disaster. It would not have taken a tenth of the lives it did if the levees had been maintained.
- According to wikipedia Katrina was only a cat 3 when it hit Louisiana. It did get up to a 5 at one point, but bot when it did most of it’s damage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
- This infuriates me so much. I am sitting here like a dumbass saying that this storm is worse than Katrina. Like I know I should do research before being confident in what I know but how many small infographics like this do we digest and then regurgitate a political opinion based off of them
  
  Worse is a hard metric to analyze when comparing 2 different storms. One may have higher winds. Another might dump more rain. Another might have brought a high storm surge to an area that couldn't handle it. Another might come in kinda mild and just stall, battering one area for a long time. One storm might do massively more damage if it hits Atlanta vs. Miami. I'll forgive people for getting a little hyperbolic when describing a storm that has personally impacted them. Storms may hit a broad region, but the impact of a storm is always hyper local.

Not sure what the science is between 2 images with no source or timestamp and nearly 20 years of technological improvement between them is but this isn't the peak of Katrina
Katrina ultimately reached its peak strength as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale on August 28. Its maximum sustained winds reached 175 mph (280 km/h) and its pressure fell to 902 mbar (hPa; 26.63 inHg), ranking it among the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.
It probably refers to its stats at landfall
Katrina weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall along the northern Gulf Coast, first in southeast Louisiana (sustained winds: 125mph) and then made landfall once more along the Mississippi Gulf Coast (sustained winds: 120mph). Katrina finally weakened below hurricane intensity late on August 29th over east central Mississippi.
But power doesn't equal damage for weather
[Katrina] is the costliest hurricane to ever hit the United States, surpassing the record previously held by Hurricane Andrew from 1992. In addition, Katrina is one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorological_history_of_Hurricane_Katrina
https://www.weather.gov/mob/katrina
- But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
  Only if you count what happened in New Orleans after the storm, which was an infrastructure issue, not a weather issue.
  
  Why are you making this some type of competition?
  
  You're splitting hairs.

- Evidently they fucked themselves by voting against Gore, too.
  
  Maybe Florida voted majority against gore, we will likely never know

It’s also good to remember that Katrina’s storm surge and the subsequent failure of the levees and flooding of the city is what was so damaging.
Besides the wind and rain the destruction of the levees took a huge toll on New Orleans.

The next storm?
- Is that a real image?
  
  It's a real screenshot from 2004's banger The Day After Tomorrow.
  
  Hate how people are downvoting this guy just for asking a question, like what is this, reddit?
  
  Why would a satellite actually imaging storms want to place a satellite in the image as well?
  I think its from some movie, like "the Day after Tomorrow" or something.
  Because in movies you can have a shot of a satellite while showing a shot of the storm. I think that's fairly harder to do in real life, seeing you'd have to have two satellites perfectly in sync (and they go pretty fast) or a satellite (space stations are satellites as well) with a very long selfie stick.
  Edit actually yah googled "the day after tomorrow storm" and this was one of the first images to pop up, the exact same image https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/scale_862/public/2022/12/storm.jpg
  
  Geostorm. Fun enough throwaway Gerard Butler movie.

Wow, so according to MTG, I guess Democrat technology has really advanced over the past few years!
- If that's who she means by They.
  
  I guess “They” could have been me. I am voting blue, hopefully I didn’t vote blew and accidentally summon Helene with my democrat science/leechcraft.
- Not necessarily. They might just be able to choose the strength at will and decided not to start out with the max output back with Katrina.

As someone not from hurricane continent, these images are freaking scary. Like what do you mean the hurricanes are several times bigger than my entire country?
I'm just sitting here thinking holy hell I hope cyclones don't come to my comfy corner of North-Eastern Europe

Wimdy.
But the least wimdy going forward.
\ We gonna achieve such terrifying new records in just years!

With Climate Change we'll eventually run out of names. Unless Hurricane Karen manages to be the one that kills everyone before that happens.
- There are something like ~500 million names.
  
  Ok that may take a few years.

Helene looks like a thrice-divorced hurricane.
I think we’re just a few years away from the planetary cyclones in Day After Tomorrow.
- I want someone to project that map onto a globe to illustrate how ridiculous it was. The elegantly circular arcs of the north sides of those storms would look bizarrely teardrop-pinched, if I'm not mistaken.

this can't be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
This is like me comparing the joplin tornado to the el reno tornado.
(for those that don't know the joplin tornado was an extremely erratic EF/F 5 tornado that was incredibly strong and just sort of showed up and then lingered over a particular area causing immense destruction, whereas el reno was a massive, very powerful tornado, that was collectively rated to be about an EF/F 3 i believe, although the core itself, and numerous shenanigans it pulled including sub vorticies or whatever the correct term is were much stronger, causing strong localized damage)
- The different categories are the point. What they're missing though is Helene was much closer to a category 5. It's winds were 15 mph short of that category and the storm tail you can see in the above photo is characteristic of category 5 Hurricanes. That in and of itself isn't a big deal. The big deal is that it's the second storm at this strength this year. The first one stayed coastal where they're used to all that rain.
  What the picture is basically saying is Katrina was a warning shot. An actual Category 5 with winds well past 157 mph is going to hit the wrong spot and we're all going to regret not taking climate change seriously.
  
  going to
  I don't unpack my go bag anymore even though we only evacuate every sixth year or so. I've lived here 30 years and we've evacuated 4 times, will probably need to this year or next (fire season is almost over). Although, I'm calculating like it happens steadily, not taking into account the acceleration. 1996. 2007. 2017. 2020. uh, fuck. Now that I type that out, those last two are an awful "coincidence" and I need to go sit down.
  
  The different categories are the point.
  are they? storms are not like a magic black box that outputs a specific strength of storm, the point i'm making is that we should be comparing every storm we have since the beginning of recorded history and comparing them to what we're seeing now, rather than taking one storm from like a decade ago, and comparing it to another now. This is a completely arbitrary description of climate change.
- this can't be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.
  What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
  
  What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.
  yeah but i don't really see how that matters. Weather is extremely complicated, and unless hurricanes are a lot more consistent than i think they are, this is a lot like comparing two random tornados together, and then being surprised when one of them is a lot worse than the other.
  If that's what we're doing we should compare the tri state tornado to any tornado in the last 10 years and suddenly tornados must be a lot less dangerous now than back when the tri state tornado hit.
  It's an entirely arbitrary mechanism of comparison. It's just wrong.
  Even if the point is trying to convey the difference between different storms, i can pick up two different rocks, they're both different rocks. You can't really glean something from 2 data points effectively.

Really interesting. Is there a source for the pictures and data to share with friends?
- I do not have a good source for that particular picture, but here are lots of links for you:
  https://www.axios.com/2024/10/04/hurricane-helene-deadliest-us-storms-death-toll
  
  Science!

Are those images the same scale?
- Not quite, the Helene one is between 25% and 50% more zoomed in based on what I can see of the bump of Louisiana and the shape of Cuba. Still a striking comparison even with that accounted for.
  Edit: Oh wait, I misread the uncovered coast line on Cuba. I think that's actually closer than I initially thought. They just have it panned and rotated a little.