Tropical Storm Gordon made landfall about 50 km to the east of Biloxi, Mississippi, on Wednesday 5 September 2018, bringing with it winds of slightly under 115 kilometres per hour (the point at which it would be upgraded to a hurricane), and widespread flooding, along the costs of Lousiana, Mississipi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. One person has been reported dead due to the storm, an as yet un-named child killed in Escambia County, Florida, by a tree falling onto a mobile home, and about 50 000 people were left without power, mostly in Alabama.
Emergency services in Escabia County, Florida, attend the scene of the only known fatality associated with Tropical Storm Gordon, a child killed when a falling tree hit a mobile home. WCCO.
Tropical storms are caused by the warming effect of the Sun over
tropical seas. As the air warms it expands, causing a drop in air
pressure, and rises, causing air from outside the area to rush in to
replace it. If this happens over a sufficiently wide area then the
inrushing winds will be affected by centrifugal forces caused by the
Earth's rotation (the Coriolis effect). This means that winds will be
deflected clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the
southern hemisphere, eventually creating a large, rotating Tropical
Storm. They have different names in different parts of the world, with
those in the northwest Atlantic being referred to as hurricanes.
Despite the obvious danger of winds of this speed, which can physically
blow people, and other large objects, away as well as damaging buildings
and uprooting trees, the real danger from these storms comes from the
flooding they bring. Each drop millibar drop in air-pressure leads to an
approximate 1 cm rise in sea level, with big tropical storms capable of
causing a storm surge of several meters. This is always accompanied by
heavy rainfall, since warm air over the ocean leads to evaporation of
sea water, which is then carried with the storm. These combined often
lead to catastrophic flooding in areas hit by tropical storms.
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