Why are they doing this?

This is Invest 93.

This is not a hurricane, a tropical storm or even a tropical depression. I am not positive, but I don't think it is even a tropical wave. So what is it? A thunderstorm. The image above came from Weather Underground. I have used Weather Underground for several years and this is the first year I have seen an Invest anything. They are tracking these Invests on the local news also.

The other site I use a lot for storm tracking is the National Hurricane Center site that is run by NOAA. They aren't tracking Invests. They track actual, honest to God named storms, not a little blurb of clouds that may or may not turn into anything.

Now I am not a Hurricane expert, but this feels like the Repubs bull shit color-coded terror alert. There is nothing to be scared of, so we are going to manufacture something to keep you on edge.

I lived through the 04 and 05 Hurricane season. No, I did not live in New Orleans for Katrina, and we are in a place that almost never takes a direct hit (last, closest storm was Eloise in '75)*, but the STRESS of those storms swirling around in the Gulf is more than a person can imagine if they have not lived through it. You do not know how many times a week I was waking myself up in the middle of the night by the end of the '05 season. Why? Because I was afraid we had not boarded the windows, because I was afraid we didn't have enough bottled water, because I could not remember if my son were asleep in his room across the hall, what if he were out in the storm? This was when there were no storms!


So I am going to start using only the NOAA site full time. I will check in with Weather Underground IF there are any named storms out there, maybe. And I will prepare appropriately if a storm is swirling around out there, but I can not deal with stressing over something that isn't anything at all.

*Non-direct hits can still be bad. Opal in '95 was a nightmare for the entire county and the eye was over 100 miles away. Ivan in '04 spawned F3 tornados (almost unheard for this area) over 24 hours before the storm came ashore. It is a little scary to sit in the hallway with my son and the 2 dogs while wondering where DSD's oldest son had gone and was he ok while one of the tornados passed over head without touching down.