Tropical Storm Laura is now a Category 4 major hurricane with maximum sustained wind speeds in excess of 240 kph(150 mph). Earlier today, the National issued the unprecedented warning of

"unsurvivable" storm surge on the SW LA,SE TX coast. Landfall is expected overnight Thursday morning. Keep in mind, landfall is based on the storm's eye;those in harm's way near the coast will have been living with the storm for many hours by landfall. In lecture, we discussed the basic energy flows of a tropical storm, if we modeled the storm as a heat engine: 1. Heat sourced from the ocean 2. Heat rejected to outer space 3. Work outputs a. Wind b. Storm surge c. I forgot this one: lifting the central column of air. Recall, all the air flowing into the storm converges in the eye,then heads skyward. Estimate Laura's power dissipation at any reasonable time of your choosing. For example, some time after the storm has died out is not reasonable at all. Compare your results to entities with comparable power output (cities, states,nations, etc.) Don't forget some of your analysis requires the density of seawater; you shouldn't have trouble finding it with a simple web search. Be sure to cite your sources. Only consider the kinetic energy of the wind and the work done moving the storm surge water. Don't worry about the energy; we will save the heat rejected to outer space for another day. NOAA's Digital Weather forecast site (screenshot above) is an excellent source of information. There's a colorbar at the top and a terse explanation of the data. Unfortunately, the forecast doesn't show any distances, but you can use another map to estimate the size of the wind field. Explore the sites. Have fun. Make and download animated GIFS of series of satellite images. The amount of data available is staggering. If desired, you can download data in several formats. Windy.com is an excellent aggregator of data from NOAA and analagous agencies in other countries. See also wind map and earth.