Dang It! I Was Wrong

In the comments and discussion to this post, about WREG's weather hysteria over Hurricane (now Super Soaker) Dennis, I incorrectly said that Hurricane Ivan hit the Carolinas from the ocean and hugged the coast.

I was wrong! As you can , Ivan landed on the Third Coast near Mobile and then tracked up Alabama and into East Tennessee before riding along the crest of the Appalachians across the Carolinas and Virginia, and thence back to sea.

But as the analysis from the site (the National Weather Service) says:

As the depression moved across northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia Friday afternoon, the Piedmont of North Carolina remained in the warm sector of the storm. As late morning and afternoon temperatures reached the 80s, several rain bands became enhanced and produced damaging winds and several tornadoes. Tornadoes, varying in intensity from F0 to F2, touched down producing damage to homes, businesses, and trees in Guilford, Rockingham, Moore, and Chatham Counties.

So my point, while off, was close to correct. The "warm sector" is where energy from the ocean is pulled into the extreme low pressure system that is a hurricane. Dennis didn't have that. Its warm sector got cut off from the ocean fairly soon after hitting land and moving northwest. Ivan's rain bands got more energy; Dennis' didn't.

Also, scroll down the page to look at the rainfall totals. The worst, heaviest Ivan rains fell on the Appalachians; drainage was to the rain-hit eastern coast. Rain in the Mississippi Delta won't flow massively in one direction like that, but will mostly drain into the soil or into creeks and rivers around the area before hitting the Mississippi River (or the Tennessee to the east). Different conditions.

Read the discussion in the Half-Bakered post I linked to above. Commenter "Anonymous" the first, seems to think that WREG wasn't being over-active or over the top. Several of us disagreed. I mean, when Dennis hasn't even hit Cuba yet and WREG is talking up a "Strong Winds Advisory" that the National Weather Service is planning to issue in several days, warning about 40 and 50 mph winds, I think they're jumping the gun at the least. At worst, they are panicking viewers into watching their newscasts, a reprehensible thing to do.

I'm sorry Anonymous1 didn't identify themselves, as they sound like someone in the news business (maybe even from WREG, as some of the comments' wording suggests), and might have some authority to add to their comments that anonymity removes.

Also, yet another example of blog accountability in action! Something felt wrong about the discussion so I went to sources to see what actually happened. Turned out I was wrong. Too bad I didn't do that before going to hit the "Publish" button, but at least I did check myself. And the correction is part of the regular stream of posts, same level of emphasis as the usual flow of hoo-ha you get here. With links to the original booboo. No cryptic comments buried on inner pages or plain-spoken no-graphics flyby here.

Oops. No back-patting. Humility. I was wrong.