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Originally posted by Socrato
Let's shoot for New Orleans. Make it happen or you're fired."
O'Neill visits the newly retired General Hammond, and finds Hammond's two granddaughters playing in the backyard. Jack pushes the general for the truth behind his surprise retirement, and finally gets it: two weeks ago he received a phone call from the N.I.D., telling him to get his act together. The Stargate, they believe, must be used to acquire advanced technology by any means necessary. Hammond flatly refused.
The next day, two men dressed in plain clothes picked up his granddaughters from school. The kids weren't hurt -- the men just drove them around the block a few times and dropped them off. But Hammond got the message, he tells Jack.
So they call up HARP.... "Send one full blown massive hurricane to Louisiana, and can I get that with extra pickles and ketchep..."
As someone who went through Katrina in "da NOLA" as we call it, I think I am qualified just a wee bit to chime in here.
In the tropics, where hurricanes form, easterly winds called the trade winds steer a hurricane towards the west. In the Atlantic basin, storms are carried by these trade winds from the coast of Africa, where they often develop (see Hurricane Genesis: Birth of a Hurricane), westward towards the Caribbean Sea and the North American coasts.
Embedded within the global winds are large-scale high and low-pressure systems. The clockwise rotation (in the Northern Hemisphere) of air associated with high-pressure systems often cause hurricanes to stray from their initially east-to-west movement and curve northward. One such high-pressure system, often referred to as the Bermuda High (Azores High) (depending on its location) or more generally as a subtropical ridge, often dominates the North Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic hurricanes typically propagate around the periphery of the subtropical ridge, riding along its strongest winds. If the high is positioned to the east, then hurricanes generally propagate northeastward around the high’s western edge into the open Atlantic Ocean without making landfall. However, if the high is positioned to the west and extends far enough to the south, storms are blocked from curving north and forced to continue west, putting a large bulls-eye on Florida, Cuba, and the Gulf of Mexico, as was the case during much of the 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons.
Yep they definitely steered it... That part was pretty obvious...