Impacts of Hurricane Katrina due to Storm Surge and Topographic Conditions: Why Only Wind Used to Categorize Hurricanes?

Hurricanes are at the top of the list as the phenomena that cause the most damage and fatalities worldwide, making it critical for accurate prediction and preparedness strategies. In 2005, a catastrophic Hurricane called Katrina caused a rippling effect amongst meteorologists and the National Hurricane Center as a result of the divergence in the numerical models, such as, “spaghetti models” and other forecast tools. Katrina presented a unique behavior for the rapid intensification from Category 1 passing through the southeastern U.S. to a Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, finally making landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana (Lat: 29.9511^° N, Lon: 90.0715°W) on August 29^th as a downgraded Category 3. New Orleans, located on the coast of warm Gulf of Mexico waters, is a uniquely vulnerable city to natural disasters such as hurricanes. The marshes and swamps that envelop the city of New Orleans act as a levee due to their location at the lowest point of New Orleans of about 2 meters. Elevation from the center of the city gradually decreases towards the coastal areas, creating a downward slope and a greater amplitude in the waves that invaded this wetland and continue to propagate into the Mississippi River, Lake Borgne, Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas, Lake Salvador, and Lac Des Allemands, exceeding their limits of water behavior. The tourist destination city that is widely popular for celebrating Mardi Gras with a lively culture full of blues and jazz music, was unfortunately submerged after the passage of this catastrophic natural phenomenon. As of today, New Orleans is still recovering from nearly 200 billion dollars in damage and causing over 1000 fatalities, with several still missing, mostly due to flooding. This paper focuses on the dynamics of one of the top three deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history. Beyond these conditions are the concerns regarding the intensification and impact of tropical cyclones. This study provides an extensive review of the tropical cyclones in the Gulf Coast, specifically New Orleans. By examining historical data and meteorological intricacies such as forecast errors, sea surface temperatures, pressure tendencies, surrounding low-pressure systems, wind shear, and most importantly storm surge, the aim is to not only explore the complexities of hurricane dynamics but also serve as a foundation for advancing prediction strategies in an escalating uncertainty in climate, especially for vulnerable areas. This paper explores different strategies in predicting intense hurricanes comparable to Katrina and highlights that removing the storm surge parameter in hurricane detection was crucial to defining destruction and casualties, the same problem seen in one of the most recent hurricanes that hit Florida in 2022, Hurricane Ian. Despite the major improvement in technology and data collection, there are still frequent gaps in the forecast models of hurricane path, intensity, and size. The methods used were complex and challenging since data collection from the several airports in New Orleans was compromised by the intense winds and storms of Hurricane Katrina that few still have not repaired to date. Due to this, various resources were used as available reanalysis data, currently, satellite and radar images. However, it should be noted that to use reanalysis data it is necessary to validate the data with surface meteorological stations, though the only surface data available was before Katrina and at least several days afterward. Through reanalysis data and past models compared to post-tropical cyclone reports, there are critical findings, even with the complications of malfunctioning stations to collect observational data to correlate. It is concluded that the difficulties in deciphering the direct path, the intensification of this hurricane within a few hours to a few days, presenting record low atmospheric pressure as well as destructive winds, were essential for the storm to emerge and define the catastrophic impact- as well as the significance of encompassing predicting the magnitude of storm surges prior to a natural disaster instead of implementing in past tropical cyclone reports. Future research is extremely important to provide more support for this study on Hurricane Katrina. The lack of surface data since 2005, before the impact, provides no contribution towards the improvement of numerical models currently used, inducing error and difficulty in making more accurate forecasts of future hurricanes, and elimination of key parameters such as storm surge- since all the coastal states of the U.S. are at a comparable sea level or below.