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From: Jesse Ferrell (WeatherMatrix) (ferrell{at}weathermatrix.net)
Date: Tue Mar 30 2004 - 08:05:45 EST
http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p135mar04.htm
"While American weather experts analyzing satellites pictures called the
Brazilian phenomenon a hurricane even before it hit shore, their Brazilian
counterparts preferred to treat it as an “extratropical cyclone.” Brazil’s
Center for Weather Forecasting and Climatic Studies, a branch of the Inpe
(National Institute of Space Research), on Saturday, was still classifying
the storm as a cyclone, that would have winds with speeds between 37 and 44
miles an hour. They would be proved wrong since winds reached 75 miles an
hour and up.
Even after the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration divulged
satellite photos late Saturday afternoon showing the real power of the
storm, Maria Assunção Dias, Inpe’s meteorologist, went on Globo TV’s Jornal
Nacional, the leading prime-time news show in Brazil to defend the
Brazilian position:
“The Americans, who are used to follow tropical hurricanes in the North
Atlantic region, take a peek at the satellite image and think this is a
hurricane. If they paid a little more attention to the details, they would
see that we have a different structure here. In a hurricane, winds in the
lower levels turn in one direction, but spin in the opposite direction in
the upper levels. Here, they turn equally from the surface to the upper
levels.”
On Sunday, the official position had changed a little. Laura Rodrigues,
from Santa Catarina’s Meteorology Center admitted that the weather
phenomenon had shown “characteristics different from those we are used to”
and announced that her and her colleagues were trying to decide if Brazil
was hit by a cyclone or a hurricane. “The episode has characteristics of a
hurricane,” she said, “but it is still too early to decide with certainty.”
Finally on Monday afternoon, Brazilian weather experts admitted that the
winds that hit the Brazilian coast were above hurricane strength. Winds
were as high as 94 miles per hour.
Echoing the observations of many other fellow Brazilian citizens at the
Internet forum of Rio’s daily O Globo, Otávio da Silva wrote: “The
authorities have to stop thinking that Brazil is free from natural
catastrophes, that those only happen in the United States and other parts
of the world and that we don’t need to be prepared for the consequences.
What happened in the early hours of Sunday was a category one hurricane and
the Americans were warning us about this, 24 hours ahead of time. The
population could have been prepared through an alert given through radio
and TV. Unfortunately we saw that the mind of many Brazilians cannot
understand that much. That’s regrettable.”
Rosana Torres da Silva was even more emphatic: “The population should have
been given special protection by the authorities, who apparently
underestimated the massive power of the cyclone. Who ended paying once
again for the authorities’ irresponsibility were the common, poor,
uninformed citizens. Many of them will have to restart their lives from
zero. It seems that in Brazil we need to have a tragedy first so we can
take the necessary steps, when the opposite should occur: to prevent so we
don’t have to be fixing things after the fact. When are you going to learn
that?”
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