Posted on 08/28/2011 6:12:42 AM PDT by gusopol3
The Schuylkill is expected to crest Sunday night at fifteen feet -- a level we haven't seen in more than 140 years, according to Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.
"That is historically significant," said Nutter. "We have not seen that level of cresting since 1869."
The 1869 flooding was caused by the "Saxby Gale" hurricane on October 4. The Federal Emergency Management Agency named it a 100 year flood for the Schuylkill.
In his 10 p.m. briefing Saturday night, Mayor Nutter said he fully expect the creeks, river and streams will flood.
"The Schuylkill Expressway is experiencing flooding as well as in the Cobbs Creek area and a number of streets in the city," Nutter said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcphiladelphia.com ...
So.
There WAS bad weather before 20th-century America caused Anthropogenic Global Warming with all her makin’ and consumin’!
Oh no! Not the Saxby Gale!
In late 1868, Lieutenant Stephen Martin Saxby of the Royal Navy wrote a letter (published on 25 December) to the Standard of London that stated:
“I now beg leave to the state, with regard to 1869, that at seven a.m., on October 5, the moon will be at that part of her orbit which is nearest to the earth. Her attraction will, therefore, be at its maximum force. At noon of the same day the moon will be on the earth’s equator, a circumstance which never occurs without mark atmospheric disturbance, and at two p.m. of the same day lines drawn from the earth center would cut the sun and moon in the same arc of right ascension (the moon’s attraction and the sun’s attraction will therefore be acting in the same direction); in other words, the new moon will be on the earth’s equator when in perigee, and nothing more threatening can, I say, occur without miracle. (The earth, it is true, will not be in perihelion and by some 16 or 17 seconds of semi-diameter.) With your permission, I will, during September next, for the safety of mariners, briefly reminding your readers of this warning.”
Saxby, a navel engineering instructor and astronomer, based his prognostication on the thesis that the moon controls the weather as it goes through its phases, and this letter was part of his active campaign to promote his thesis. He had submitted his findings to Robert FitzRoy, then head of the British Meteorological Office. FitzRoy not only rebuffed his work but scorned all lunar-based weather predictions in The Weather Book. In reply, Saxby published a second edition of his book entitled Saxby’s Weather System in London in 1864. In it, he documented his forecasting technique and pointed out the contradictions in FitzRoy’s work.
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/almanac/arc2010/alm10oct.htm
amazing he could to all that without computers and climate models, no?
I was just thinking that he’d either be a twenty first century James Hansen or Dr. Roy Spencer, nothing in between.
It surprises me that the flood graph keeps updating itself here on the FR page
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