Descriptive Study of the influence of hurricane Beta on the Providencia and Santa Catalina Islands

Abstract

The hurricane 2005 season will be registered in history as one of the most devastating in human kind, in which historical records were broken up to that moment of the tropical depressions, with thirty storms and fourteen hurricanes, out of which, five were considered “high”, this is, they reached the categories three, four or five at the Saffir-Simpson scale. During this season the United States Hurricane National Center and the world wide meteorologists had to resort to the Greek alphabet to name them once they were out of the previously chosen names for that year.

On October 28, 2005 and for a space of twelve hours, hurricane Beta, of category one, passed through following a very particular path, over the Colombian Islands, Providencia and Santa Catalina. Using these data to describe with scientific meteorology the hurricane passage, becomes an important environmental data bank of reference which can be utilized to supply records to the disaster attention and prevention, as well as to understand forthcoming experiences of these meteorological phenomena in our country.

The following paper in a descriptive manner the obtained in situ data has been analyzed at the Providencia Island, during the passage of the meteorological phenomenon, complementing its values with the analysis of the satellite images and the remote sensors which simultaneously was carried out by the Oceanographic and Hydrographic Research Center Forecasting Central.

The academic findings permitted the reconstruction of the meteorological phenomenon behavior, as well as the possible causes and effects of its evolution.