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Rainfall Due to Hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere Essay examples

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Hurricane Irene affected the Caribbean and much of the United States' east coast and was one of the most damaging tropical cyclones of the 2011 Atlantic tropical cyclone season. Irene originated east of the Lesser Antilles from a well defined Atlantic tropical wave in that area, and became Tropical Storm Irene on August 20, 2011. Irene reached its highest point as a 120 mph Category 3 hurricane. Irene was ranked the seventh costliest hurricane with damages that cost around $15.6 billion in the United States. Irene produced record breaking rainfall across the mid Atlantic and northeastern United States. The highest rainfall recorded during Hurricane Irene's storm run was in Bayboro, North Carolina at about 15.7 inches of rain. At …show more content…

The study that was analyzed utilizes a Geographic Information System (GIS) to characterize the spatial patterns of rainfall produced by Irene and to classify other tropical cyclones that took the same track as Irene over the United States. A GIS is a system that is designed to capture, store, maneuver, examine, manage, and present all types of geographical data. In order to use the GIS they first had to identify analog tropical cyclones that took a path similar to Irene over the United States which they obtained from HURDAT. HURDAT, or the North Atlantic hurricane database, is the system that keeps all the records for all tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea, since 1851. Once similar tropical storms were obtained, then the latitude and longitude coordinates from the six hourly positions of Irene were entered into the GIS and the points were then transformed into a line feature. This line feature represents Irene's track and it was buffered by 200 kilometers to allow for the tropical cyclones to be analyzed in this study region. The tropical cyclones that were similar to Irene were then imported into the GIS. Once the buffer was applied there were twenty five tropical cyclones with tracks similar to that of Irene. But the track of the hurricanes wasn't the only thing being studied here, we still have to take

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