• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Sep 25, 2008 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Two LSU scientists confirm what many people in Baton Rouge already suspect — Hurricane Gustav is likely the most powerful and destructive storm to hit the area since 1950.

The damaging nature of Gustav came down to three factors — the intensity of the winds, the duration of the winds, and the way the winds changed direction as the storm moved inland.

“People who have lived here longer than 1950 said Gustav was the worst,” S.A. Hsu, professor of meteorology and a certified consulting meteorologist, said Wednesday.

So to answer the question of “how bad was it,” he and Brian Blanchard, a research meteorologist, decided to compare Gustav to other storms that hit Baton Rouge.

They started by examining meteorological data from the weather station at Baton Rouge Metro Airport from 1950 to the present. The scientists used that information to find the five storms with the lowest daily average pressure.

Of those storms, Hurricane Gustav had the highest sustained wind speeds and the second-highest wind gusts.

On wind gusts, Hurricane Gustav came in a close second to Hurricane Betsy, which measured maximum wind gusts of 92 mph compared with Gustav’s 91 mph.

The difference between Betsy and Gustav, however, was the length of time the storms’ winds stayed around, Hsu said.

Hurricane Betsy moved through the area fairly quickly while Hurricane Gustav put sustained tropical storm-force winds in the area for at least four hours and tropical storm-force gusts for at least 10 hours, Blanchard said.

For at least two hours, Gustav’s wind gusts exceeded hurricane-strength of 74 mph, he said.

“Much higher than Katrina and comparable to Betsy and higher than Andrew,” Blanchard said.

Since the measurements were recorded at Baton Rouge Metro Airport, which is a fairly open environment, it’s likely wind gusts were higher in urban neighborhoods, Hsu said.

Gustav also had a high “gust factor,” measured by dividing the gust wind speed by the sustained wind speed, Hsu said.