The Oil Drum

Here in SoCal, a couple inches of rain in the San Bernardino mountains will trigger mudslides that wreak of havoc on the cities of San Bernardino and Highland. I believe we have much more vegetation than the mountains of eastern Oman. I can't imagine what is going on over there right now...

I would think that the reality of situations such as this in an energy system with little or no slack for shortages would be a wake up call for immediate worldwide Peak Oil preparations.

Oil = money = power. Are we willing to go over the brink before governments start preparing their citizens to live in a world with much less than what they have been accustomed to?

Could this storm be the catalyst that makes the global community have that hard family talk everyone has been avoiding?

That further energy growth with the existing infrastructure is not possible?

www.lawnstogardens.com

Check here for pictures of what Cyclone George did to the north-west of Western Australia 2 months ago- see the bottom pictures of mining camp huts (designed to withstand such winds) absolutely smashed:
http://www.abc.net.au/northwestwa/stories/s1868490.htm

Cross your fingers for oil workers in Oman and Iran.

This rainfall forecast map for THURSDAY from BBC world weather shows a relatively small area of heavy rainfall to the NE of the Oman mountains, centred on the Gulf of Oman. This area is to the N and E of main Omani oil and gas infrastructure (I think). The main hazzard IMO will be from flash flooding in wadis - that can appear hundreds of miles away from where the rain falls.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/middle_east/rain.shtml#no_url

This link to the UK MET office world weather allows you to run a short time lapse sequence - showing Gonu in the Gulf of Oman.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/satpics/africa_IR.html

Following up on my flooding comments in Gonu thread #2, a quote from the wunderground forum:

"still have power in qurum. wind speed continues to pick up - say F5. hear that road through wadi adai (major road out of muscat to quriyat - 90kms SE muscat) has been washed away in 2 locations. that road was only re-constructed 4 years ago and as afar as i can recall culverts and bridges were designed on basis of 50-year storm return period. but remains to be seen whether reports are true"

If reports are true, and they're exceeding 50-year flow in multiple locations this early in the storm curve, it's not good.

I finally found some good material to help evalutate the flood potential:
Hydrology of Wadi Systems: Chapters 1 & 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Still looking for the later chapters, but items of note from the material above:

-Available rainfall records on the Arabian peninsula reflect only spotty heavy rains; there aren't any large-area, heavy rainfall events examined, so the current event lies outside of the understanding of Oman hydrology

-It takes at least 10hrs of full flow to saturate the banks of wabis in some study areas; before this time a significant amount of the flow transmits below the surface

-Northern Oman has a large alluvial aquifer system which is used heavily for drinking water. An exceptional event like this will be a significant recharge event for that aquifer; this will likely delay the heaviest flow in wabis overlying deep alluvium.

A bit more about the coastal geology/geography; this is all going off what I can see in Google Earth / panoramia, so take w/ a grain of salt, but what I can see is three types of coastline:

Fjordlike/rugged, where the coastal range is innundated and there's no exposure of the continental shelf and no modern alluvial deposits:

Bandar Khairan

Continental shelf exposed w/ modern overburden; these areas are carbonate/limestone bedrock (I assume formed recently in the present gulf of oman) overlaid by pretty classic high-energy alluvium:

Sinkhole in Oman; 5km ssw of Dibab

I love that photo... you can very clearly see the limestone/shallow sea deposits making up most of the wall of the sinkhole, and then the very poorly sorted (wide range of particle size) fluvial (river) deposits lying on top, forming the top several meters of the subsurface. If you look closely, you can see that the larger rocks/boulders in the fluvial deposits are less rounded than the smaller rocks, indicating that they spent little time in the paleo wadi channel upstream and likely made most of their journey from outcropping to coastal plain in just a few flood events.

Anyway, to see the larger setting of this sort of coast:

Dibab, Oman

You can see that the mountains come to a smooth, sharp drop, and that the land sticking out from there extends a distance from the mountains uncorrelated with modern wabi/river paths. This is the outline of the part of the former seabed that has been lifted (or exposed by dropping sealevel). If you look closely, you can see the pattern of modern alluvium deposited on this shelf by later river action.

Lastly is active delta/fluvial dominated coast. Now, in these seas it doesn't take much to be fluvialy dominated (the wave/wind action is normally very subdued, and there's almost no tidal action to speak of), so even a wabi's intermittant flow can maintain an active delta:

Delta in NE Oman

Each of these three coastal types will exhibit a very different response to rainfall, surge, and wave... due to differences in coastal steepness, offshore landform, infiltration, existing drainage pattern, and wave action damping capacity. The modern active deltas are the lowest lying land, but have some vegetation and a greater area of existing drainage channels. The limestone platforms have generally higher land, but smaller channel capacity and reduced infiltration capacity. The rugged coastline rises quickly enough to avoid most surge/wave danger, and offers well-contained drainage, but is largely unpopulated.

The "Sleepless in Muscat" Blog has been updated this morning:
http://sleeplessinmuscat.blogspot.com/

rainsong posted a great real time(ish) GIF yesterday:
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-time/indian/storm/dvor-nh02A.GIF
anyone know how to post this?

The Eye has reformed. Storm appears to be strengthening.

http://www.krqe.com/expanded.asp?ID=21755

CNN this morning: "Cyclone Gonu Disrupts Mid-East Oil"

Oil is up sharply in Europe, less so here in the U.S.