Hurricane Ike as seen from the International Space Station
Lots of detail here at Weather Underground about the storm surges and the expected damage. 149 Terajoules was the Integrated Kinetic Energy of the storm -it has actually fallen to 124 TJ now, but that is still more than Hurricane Katrina at landfall.
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I can’t resist. Big numbers fascinate me.
So you got 149 terajoules there. America uses energy at an averate rate of about 3.6 terawatts. Which means that the power of that hurricane would last us about 42 seconds.
Cue the alternate energy freaks!
I’m not sure whether to marvel at how weak Ike is or how powerful we are.
Though it raises an interesting point that simply physical dynamics of natural processes are an immense reservoir of energy.
if we could tap the power of the earths rotation itself, we could probably do better than a few hundred measly terajoules. Plus we coudl make the earth spin more slowly, resulting in a. more sleep in the morning, and b. no need for all that silly daylight savings time nonsense.