This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The first storm warning for the Miami area wasn't issued until only a few hours before the powerful cyclone made landfall just south of downtown, leaving residents with little time to prepare for what would become the hurricane of their nightmares. When the massive Category 4 storm did strike in the early morning hours of Sept. 18, 1926, it battered the city with 145 mph (233 kilometers per hour) winds, leaving thousands of people homeless and claiming more than 100 lives in the Miami area alone.
"There is nothing like the 1926 hurricane in the historical record for Miami," said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate and tropical cyclone expert at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science. "It was very intense, very large and passed directly over downtown. It came at a time when forecasts were primitive, warnings were insufficient and people were inexperienced." The storm's widespread devastation effectively ended Florida's 1920s land boom and ushered in an early local start to the Great Depression.
While the storm did not permanently cripple the University of Miami, which had been founded in 1925, it did strike a serious blow to the fledgling institution, damaging its early buildings, forcing a temporary halt to campus construction projects and delaying the start of classes. The university, however, pressed on, opening its doors for classes in late October. And the storm, known as the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, actually inspired the school's iconic "Hurricanes" nickname.
In what is believed to be a first, McNoldy, using a meticulous reconstruction method for parameters that are not part of the 1926 storm's official historical record, has created a series of new wind field maps for the storm. Produced using a parametric model that uses observed storm characteristics such as intensity, radius of maximum wind, radii of tropical-storm-force winds and track, the maps show a surface wind swath over the hurricane's lifetime. The colors on the maps correspond to the Saffir-Simpson rating system, which classifies hurricanes based on their maximum sustained wind speed.
"Filling in the many gaps began with some estimates of the symmetric extent of the tropical-storm-force winds when environmental surface pressures were known in addition to the storm's central pressure," McNoldy said. "Empirical relationships helped to create some eyewall size estimates. Times with very sparse data were carefully blended between times with better estimates, and asymmetries were introduced based on the storm's forward speed, direction and latitude." He collaborated with John Knaff, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) meteorologist whom he has known for nearly 30 years and who is an expert in tropical cyclone size estimation.
"To my knowledge, this is the first visualization of the 1926 storm's entire wind field over its lifetime," McNoldy said. "The new information is a best guess of the quadrant-specific extent of tropical-storm-force winds and the eyewall size every six hours for 11 days. Recognizing the uncertainties surrounding the storm size estimates, it fits our sparse observations rather well.
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