About 24 hrs from now the remnant is shown to exit eastwards in almost the same location where the eye-wall first made contact with land (as ECMWF had originally predicted) then it dissipates fairly quickly to the NE (also as originally predicted by the ECMWF model).
Cyclone Idai Poised to Become Southern Hemisphere’s Deadliest Tropical Storm, With More Than 1,000 Feared Dead
Yessenia Funes
Today 1:30pm [posted here morning of March 20th 2019]
… Cyclone Idai is on track to becoming the deadliest tropical cyclone on record for the Southern Hemisphere. The deadliest storm on record in the Southern Hemisphere is Cyclone Leon-Eline in 2000, which killed some 800 people in this same region, …
... A tropical disturbance over land dumped one to two feet of rain over Mozambique some two weeks back, with one station recording 11 inches in just 12 hours March 7, he said. Once that disturbance moved over the water, Cyclone Idai formed. …
“Cyclone Idai underlines that no matter how effective early warnings are, there is still a huge demand for greater investment in resilient infrastructure in many parts of the world if we are to break the cycle of disaster-response-recovery,” said United Nations Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction Mami Mizutori, in a statement.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/cyclone-idai-poised-to-become-southern-hemisphere-s-dea-1833406709?IR=T
BBC rescue video here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-47630474/cyclone-idai-survivors-rescued-by-land-and-air
New York Times has created some useful maps recording the affected area – word is finally beginning to get out about this storm’s terrible aftermath.
Mapping the Destruction of Cyclone Idai in Mozambique
By WEIYI CAI, ALLISON MCCANN and JUGAL K. PATEL
MARCH 19, 2019
… The storm made landfall about two weeks ago near Quelimane, a city about 190 miles northeast of Beira, as a tropical depression with torrential rain. Wind speeds were only around 40 miles per hour, and after a few days, the storm changed course and moved back into the ocean. … Over the past week, the storm rapidly strengthened — wind speeds picked up to about 70 miles per hour as the storm headed back in the direction of Mozambique.
On Thursday night, the cyclone struck Mozambique for a second time. This time, however, the storm barreled toward Beira, Mozambique’s fourth-largest city, … The storm destroyed “90 percent” of Beira, a city of about a half-million people, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Monday. Aerial footage showed people huddled on dry areas, waiting to be rescued. Mr. Nyusi said that overflowing rivers had submerged villages and isolated communities. He reported seeing floating bodies.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/19/world/africa/mozambique-cyclone-idai-maps.html
The current situation:
There may be nothing that can be done about millions of people living in swampy river deltas and on major flood plains, but Governments can engineer and build dams, roads, bridges and rail connections that won't be totally demolished by a major flood, and which people can evacuate along.
I've begun to notice that the usual-suspects are already touting a CO2 induced greenhouse-effect as causation for this TC IDAI weather event within news reports. The coastline in areas north and south of Beira are littered with numerous geomorphological scars from prior and much larger cyclonic storm-surge deposits, erosion scours, and scars of associated major river flooding events. These scars all record significantly higher-energy storm events than this one, and they've been accumulating during the past thousand years or so. Such landform scars from earlier colossal cyclonic storms are Earth's 'early-warning' system. It's showing us that major tropical cyclonic storms which are significantly stronger events, are a normal part of the spectrum of weather possibilities for this coastline. In other words, the scale of Cyclone IDAI is anything but unique, 'new' or novel along the Mozambique channel coast. On the contrary, larger and more damaging storms have and will again take place in this same general area. Playing cheap games with severe weather events and breeding ignorance of them is IMHO, a very low act. I have little or no respect for unbalanced individuals or organizations who do it.
