Hurricane Ian was a Category 4 monster storm that swamped Southwest Florida with strong storm surge and maximum sustained winds of around 150 mph.
The storm had no impact on Coastal Alabama, aside from rough surf in the Gulf that led to red warning flags on the beaches.
Perhaps the storm’s biggest impact on the Mobile region was a couple of days of large mud flats within an unsightly Mobile Bay.
The hurricane, in part, contributed to the water temporarily sucked out of the Bay.
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“We have an extremely strong low-pressure system that is interacting with a cold front,” said Brian Dzwonkowski, associate professor of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama. “It creates the pressure ingredients of a strong wind from the northeast, and it blows down Mobile Bay and pushes the water toward the exists.”
He said the phenomena is called a “coastal setup.” In New Jersey, he said it is referred to as “a blowout tide.”
“These conditions are such that the water level, with the wind blowing out of the Bay, you’ll see much lower water levels,” Dzwonkowski said.
Jack Cullen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mobile, said the Mobile region had wind gusts up to 45 mph out of the North, with sustained winds throughout the day at 20-25 mph. He said it will be less gusty on Thursday.
“There is a strong high-pressure system to the North and the West and Ian brought a low-pressure system to the South and East,” said Cullen. “We call it a pressure ingredient.”
Ben Raines, a writer and filmmaker and former journalist with AL.com, said the low tide event is not that uncommon. He said it is typical to see the low tides of Mobile Bay “five to six times a year,” especially when cooler northern winds descend on the area.
He referred to Wednesday’s tide as a neap tide, when tidal ranges can be at their lowest.
“There is nothing unique about it,” Raines said. “The wind is blowing, and tides have cycles every month. It’s a weak tide. And we have all of this wind.”
Raines said the Upper Mobile-Tensaw Delta was “three feet lower than normal” on Wednesday. He anticipated the water levels returning to normal by Thursday.
Raines wrote about extreme low tide events that occurred with Hurricane Irma in 2017. Because hurricane winds blow in a circular pattern, the winds into Tampa and cities on the west coast of Florida came from the Northeast and led to conditions perfect to push water out of Tampa Bay, Raines wrote.
He said in that story that a similar condition existed in Mobile during Hurricane Katrina. Early during that storm, Raines wrote, Mobile Bay was inundated with giant mud flats where the water had retreated during the early parts of the storm. When the storm moved over coastal Alabama, the surge came in and inundated portions of downtown Mobile.
“The reason I wrote that story is we had (Hurricane Irma) in Florida that led to some weathermen in Alabama writing something about the water being pushed out of (Tampa) Bay and attributed to the storm in a weird way,” Raines said. “But it happens all the time.”
The only other effect the storm is bring to Mobile: Gorgeous weather.
“The strong winds we are talking about are bringing in dry air,” said Cullen. “Humidity (on Wednesday) is 16 percent. How often in late September can you say it’s 16 percent humidity? We have unseasonably low humidity values. Lucky for us.”
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