While Sanchez IS an idiot, I'm troubled by thousands of Internet articles
focused on "Sanchez is an idiot" and only a few on the underlying data
problem. Besides the NOAa projection for the whole Pacific basis (below), I
found these, the second is more of a backgrounder:
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2010/02/off-topic-cnn-cant-be-trusted-with-raw.html
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2010/02/off-topic-following-pacific-tsunami.html
Quoting snippets from the first:
Having spent some time yesterday going over ocean buoy data and observing
tsunamis, I was surprised to hear about a "27 foot" tsunami seen in the open
ocean. The source of this amazing rumor is, of all places, CNN
That's the essential part of the "reporting", the gist of which is that CNN
claims a nine meter tsunami was detected in deep water. There's just so much
wrong with this I don't know where to begin:
* The wave is two orders of magnitude larger than an open-water tsunami
* The wave is an order of magnitude shorter than a tsunami
* The wave precedes the expected arrival time of the tsunami by two
hours (end quotes)
The article includes some plots of buoy data. At about 1900Z, the bouy showed
3 anomalies of 20 m during its first 8 minutes of 1 min averaging after
switching from 15 min averaging. It shows several more over the next few
hours. By discarding obvious outliers, a graph of the real tsunami passage is
shown at about 2130Z with a 10 cm wave, and a few more over the next hour,
superimposed on normal tidal data.
I must admit that 10 cm of waves and 20 m of artifacts makes me worry about
these buoys, but a 9 m tsunami (in DEEP water) would have been phenomenal. I
recognize Frankel was "under attack" by Sanchez, but shouldn't he have said
"wait a minute?" He is supposed to be an expert.
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: John M. Steele <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]; U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]>
Sent: Tue, March 2, 2010 3:36:14 PM
Subject: Re: [USMA:46809] The Daily Show segment w/Rick Sanchez of CNN
While the "9 m, what's that in English" was pretty idiotic, I think something
was wrong with that buoy. Except right near the Chilean coast, NOAA's
calculations show under 40 cm for most of the ocean and more like 20 cm near
Hawaii (color bands so no way to read precisely)
http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/chile20100227/fmaxamp.png
Tsunamis are long wavelength, low height waves in deep water, but they can
build up in alarming fashion as they run into shallow water. A real 9 m
tsunami in deep water would have been a catastrophe. I'm not claiming that
Sanchez was smart enough to question the data, but I'm a little disturbed his
scientist was dumb enough not to.
________________________________
From: Phil Chernack <[email protected]>
To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]>
Sent: Tue, March 2, 2010 1:24:48 PM
Subject: [USMA:46809] The Daily Show segment w/Rick Sanchez of CNN
Pretty funny.
Wait for Jon Stewart's retort to "9 meters, what's that in English?"
http://www.hulu.com/watch/131441/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-uninformant#s-p2-sr-i1
Then, the Moment of Zen:
"The metric system is English"
http://www.hulu.com/watch/131448/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-moment-of-zen-metric-system-is-english#s-p1-sr-i1
Phil
