Now some estimates suggest the death toll from Sidr may reach 10,000. But how is it possible for a cyclone to unleash destruction on such a scale? To get a better grasp, one need only look at sea surface temperature anomalies in the Bay of Bengal before and after this storm's passage. These images are courtesy of Remote Sensing Systems. On November 11, when Sidr was spinning up off the Andaman Islands, the Bay of Bengal was characterized by pretty much uniform warm anomalies, shown in red:
But by November 15, as the storm passed by, the Bay of Bengal had become predominantly characterized by cold anomalies, depicted in blue:
The before-and-after difference, to my untrained eye, appears to be an average cooling of something like 1 degree Celsius for almost the entire Bay of Bengal. And where did this incredible amount of energy removed from the ocean go? Unfortunately, much of it it got unleashed upon Bangladesh in the form of wind and waves. Considered in this light, the news of destruction that we are now hearing should not seem so surprising.
