{"id":12699,"date":"2012-11-05T07:52:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T12:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=12699"},"modified":"2012-11-05T07:52:06","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T12:52:06","slug":"thats-a-big-twinkie-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/12699","title":{"rendered":"That's a Big Twinkie"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading about some people expressing frustration that they are still in a bad way after hurricane Sandy \u2014 no power, long lines for gasoline, etc. Yes, it’s tough and you have my sympathy and empathy (90 hours without power<\/a> this summer after being hit with a derecho gives me an inkling of the troubles)<\/p>\n

But this was no small thing. The NOAA website<\/a> discusses the energy released in a hurricane<\/p>\n

It turns out that the vast majority of the heat released in the condensation process is used to cause rising motions in the thunderstorms and only a small portion drives the storm’s horizontal winds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A typical hurricane releases an average<\/em> of 6 x 10^14 Watts of power \u2014 it’ll be higher where there is more rainfall \u2014 which is 200 times the electrical energy generation in the world. The wind energy is a fraction of a percent of that, but is still half the world’s electricity generation level. And Sandy was bigger, so the numbers will be higher. All of that, focused on the mid-Atlantic\/Northeast coastal areas.<\/p>\n

The point is that there was a lot of fury unleashed last week, and it takes some time to recover from that. Gasoline in short supply indicates some of the logistical problems going on. A lot of people, requiring a lot of energy, all of it needing to be imported somehow. All of the behind-the-scenes things we take for granted, until a disruption occurs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading about some people expressing frustration that they are still in a bad way after hurricane Sandy \u2014 no power, long lines for gasoline, etc. Yes, it’s tough and you have my sympathy and empathy (90 hours without … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,39,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-physics","category-world-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}