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Milopham Hoang Dieu

As South Texas continues to battle against Harvey's record rainfall, the people of Louisiana are marking a tragic anniversary. Twelve years ago, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans. It was one of the most devastating natural disasters to ever hit the United States, and the region still bears its scars.

Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Katrina are different beasts, to be sure. Harvey's lingering wrath is very different than Katrina's swift and destructive turn, and the social and infrastructural collapses that followed. So far, Harvey has claimed a number of lives, but it is a small fraction of Katrina's 1,800+ victims.

From a meteorological perspective, though, how do these storms compare? Other than timing -- an interesting but easily explained coincidence - do they have anything in common other than adjacent chambers in the nation's memory?