1999 Atlantic Hurricane Season and the timeline

[Olefin]

Some of the canon works mention Hurricanes in them but the real 1999 Atlantic hurricane season was devastating to the Caribbean, Mexico and the US. Just want to get input from people on the board and see what they think.

My question is should only the events from the canon be used for natural weather events or should the real life events be incorporated instead for both those writing for the game and for campaigns? For instance Hurricane Dennis and Floyd devastated North Carolina and Dennis did a lot of damage in the Virginia, PA and Maryland area - to the point that in some cases it might change or influence canon events

and you can imagine what would have happened with no functioning warning network

Similarly Hurricane Lenny hit Grenada, Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles and the Virgin Islands leaving a hell of a lot of devastation.

Love to get people's opinions - I would be thinking the same reasoning would apply to things like earthquake events in areas where there werent influences (like for instance nuclear weapon detonations) that might have changed the real world event.

[Adm.Lee]

Sure, why not? I've tried hunting up Poland's weather for summer 2000 on the web, with no luck. I've been using Krakow's reporting from 2008 instead-- pretty warm!

I love using weather in my games.

[kato13]

Given many butterflies are dead there should be fewer Hurricanes, right??? butterfly effect.

Seriously though I think using existing weather is very convenient, but realistically so much would be different due to chaos theory.

[The Dark]

The weather would certainly be different, since the nuclear explosions would both add energy to the atmosphere and add dust. A study from the American Geophysical Union in the middle part of this decade looking at a limited nuclear war between Indian and Pakistan calculated that the trough from 100 Hiroshima-scale detonations (about 1.5 megatons total) would be around 1 year after the war, with the temperature dropping about 1.5 degree Celsius and rainfall dropping by about 100mm (4 inches) on an annual basis, and it would take over two decades for those to slowly return to normal. Agriculture would be highly disrupted due to cooler temperatures, lower rainfall (6% globally the first year, declining to 9% in year 5, then slowly recovering until it's just below normal in year 26), reduced sunlight (8% in year 1, improving to 3% in year 10 and normal in year 20), particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia, where the temperature drop would be between 1 and 4 C during the summer, shortening the growing season by 10-40 days. Larger-scale conflicts, such as the Twilight War, would be worse.

[Olefin]

So would the nuclear attacks make the hurricane season of 1999 even worse? Again remember it was one of the worst on record - and it definitely would not have made things fun for the CivGov units in Maryland and the Carolinas

On the other hand that much rain would have filled reservoirs and offset any drought effects for at least 2000 - and could have contributed to forest fire problems in 2001 if the new growth from all that rain then dried out

[Targan]

Hurricanes form over warm ocean water and derive their energy from warm, moist air. During the T2K nuclear winter (or "nuclear fall") you're likely to get less hurricanes, and those that do form are likely to be less energetic.

There are other types of storms though. I'd say what we'd be talking about would be more like autumn-winter low pressure system storms. The combination of severe winds and low temperatures would be pretty brutal in the T2K environment.

Maybe I'm being overly pedantic. Some poor soldier in the middle of nowhere enduring a bad storm won't care much about the details of its formation or the correct meteorological terminology for it I guess.