2013 Lack of Hurricanes

"The theory that hotter means more huricanes is directly contradicted ..."

I think that hurricanes peak when sea-surface temperatures are the highest, which happens later than the solstice. It might be more precise to say they peak when the maximum amount of energy can be extracted from the sea surface (see AOML post above). Maybe they peak when the (sea-air) temperature difference is maximum, above some threshhold SST? Anyway, let's define the theory stringently before finding it to be contradicted.

 

Hurricanes: Science and Society: Variability of Hurricane Activity

The theory that just more heat more huricanes is directly contradicted because huricanes do not occur when sea surface temperatures or the air over them is the hottest.

You need a subtler theory that actually correspond to conditions that make hurricanes more likely. Then you need to establish that higher ghg concentrations make those conditions more likely. The more heat (either water or air) more hurricanes does not make any sense. If it did we would have huricanes peaking earlier in the year in the atlantic or further south.

 

AustinG that is exactly the graph I was thinking about, WRT the summer solstice.

 

Happy to say that nhc.noaa.gov website remains active. Gulf coast people don't need me to tell them to pay attention to TS Karen; they already know.

the aoml thcp map does not the Gulf of Mexico being an excellent heat source now, good.

 

That's what I like, a testable hypothesis! Good on ya! Earth-arriving CMEs have been well detected for about 30 years, and no tropical cyclones in any oceanic basins have been missed during that time. Expensive satellites doing their jobs...

Whether it is Corbyn or mojo or anyone else doing the tests, I don't care. But over that time, N~1000 tropical cyclones is a substantial data set. We also have ENSO and all the other oceanic 'sloshes', so the CME effect looks totally testable.

You want to know, right? I want to know. Only question is who will do the work. I am not volunteering.

 

Hurricane??!!
Why doesn't anybody tell me these things?!?!?!

WHERE??

 

Its a tropical storm about 250 miles south south west of the mouth of the mississippi. It could turn into a huricane, it may remain a tropical storm.

We are at the longest interval in recorded US history without a major hurricane (cat 3 or above) making landfall (its been since 2005). This makes it extremely unlikely that the predictions that global warming will cause more major huricanes to hit the US are correct. Those that made those predictions are hoping that Karen or some other tropical storm will cause a lot of damage and hurt people.

 

Oh....yeah.
Karen.

This storm has the has the current world record for going from a wave to a tropical storm.
FEMA, NOAA, and the USAF have been all over this storm like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat.

They've deployed enough dropsondes in the Gulf to enable somebody to walk from Pensacola to Havana trying to leg this storm into a Hurricane.
They're not doing it for the the AGW debate.....let's just say that if there's a hurricane in the Gulf that a lot more "essential" folks in the government than there are when it's just a weak Tropical Storm.

Personally?
I believe that all of the Federal employees are going to get their back-pay....and probably close to their normal pay cycle (just like all of the other times.) so this isn't ALL monetarily driven....at least by the slow down. Certain government agencies profit from a stormy storm season, and our Federal Government is incapable of saving money during quiet storm seasons for when it's not-so-quiet.
I have family members that are Federal employees....but that's OK.
I have family members that are toad sucking, bed wetting, weaselly attorneys too.

Me?
I'm GLAD Karen appears to be a only a middling tropical storm!

YMMV.

 

I have nothing against the good people at NOAA, they do a fine job, and the country has never been harmed by the agency. They are the agency that actually studies and sometimes debunks claims that bad weather is really climate change. If your job is to watch huricanes and tropical storms around the US, its been a really boring year, and I guess with a big staff you need to pump up whatever you get.

Now we have a lot of political evangelists that believe that instead of negotiating they should shut down the government. Then the other side calls them terrorist, and starts shooting the hostages (american people) to prove they care as little for the american people as the other side, not at all, and this is about winning. Michelle bachman "we are very happy we closed down the government", raised by Harry Reid " your an idiot if you think I would let the nih, or va, or national parks reopen, we are winning". You have to give it to the poor guy at noaa, or nih, or fema, that just wants to go back to work. Its not his fault that those in congress hate america. I'm paraphrasing, but you can find the video clips that say that.

 

In #44 I suggested (very unclearly!) that GOM surface heat content was very low. To the extent that AOML TCHP is the necessary proximate factor, this storm hadn't a realistic chance of becoming a hurricane.

But one would rather not cry 'no wolf' to people living on an amazingly poorly defended coast.

You may remember the name Grinsted (paleo SL discussion). I would also mention his 2012 and 2013 papers in PNAS on hurricane-related storm surge. This is a 'tide gauge' group extending their expertise into new areas and worth your attention.

 

I would be interested in a per year graph of the distribution of hurricanes per year but these numbers are too small for percentage. Perhaps a better approach is just a count of all hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones and show the counts per month for each year of the past 100 years.

Bob Wilson

 

I don't follow you Bob. This seems to describe the posted graph, which is just for the north Atlantic. If you mean for each 'hurricane basin', we'd better plot them separately. NE Australia and Tahiti area, for example, get their storms from November to April. A global composite might turn out to be rather flat, month to month. However the N hemisphere gets more total cyclones than the S.

I really don't know why that is. N Atl cyclogenesis often begins over land (Africa). In the N Pacific, it rarely does. So it is not simply the shortage of land area in S. hemis.

WXman, help!

 

Good point about separating the hemispheres. I should have explained my hypothesis . . . the peak seasons may be shifting. One storm does not a pattern make but it would be interesting to see if the distributions are showing a shift to earlier and later in the year per hemisphere.

It does need to be over a long interval, 100 years, because of the improved metrics and trustable records.

Bob Wilson

 

Here's the problem: HURDAT for N Atl begins in 1850, and before 1940-ish, storms strictly at sea (though not land-falling) could have been missed. This is the standard cudgel thumped on the heads of studies that use the full record. In all other basins, the records are shorter, and arguably with more gaps.

Within those decades (any decades) the variations are large. Ocean sloshes are the 'haystack' and secular T trends are the 'needle'. Short records mean statistical tests have low power. I suggest that trends in seasonal peaks would be harder to detect than trends in number, power, storm surge, or what have you. But more fundamentally, a change in seasonal peak time is less interesting than those other factors. At least it would be to me. So I am 'off the bus' on this one.

For US and China land-falling hurricanes I know of much longer studies based on sedimentation records. They may also exist for other basins. Sedimentation is great, a book waiting to be read. but the studies I know have poor date control. This is because it needs to be done by 14C accelerator mass spectrometry. Expensive. When we develop the fiscal will, we will open that book. The sediments await our decision. They ain't goin' nowhere.

Let's just start about 1750 when ENSO 'came online'. We know enough other things about those 260 years (like CO2 and solar cycle) to get the haystack under control. If a temperature 'needle' exists, it can be found.

If there is no temperature needle, fine. Just use the much better records to arrange coastal defenses in the appropriate places. Spend money wisely.

 

Let's be clear, the boy crying wolf here, was talking about religion of global warming. As this is all about using grey literature, and turning over the null hypothesis. As Trenberth said "If you can't prove it isn't global warmings fault, these huricanes must be caused by global warming". Well if we are going to kick science in the balls, we can say using the same reasoning, if you can't prove its not global warmings fault, this lack of huricanes isn't caused by global warming. Hey that is he unreasonable reasoning from the people who claim the sky is falling. The correct thing is to tell the boy crying wolf, to STFU and let others that actually follow the science look at things. The fine folks at NOAA that actually follow the science are a good place to start.

These things are quite simple. Huricanes are rare and cluster. It was likely simply natural variation that caused the increase in 2004 and 2005, and it is likely it is simply natural variation that is the explanation for this lower level of huricanes. That would be the scentific basis if you follow the proper scientific method and don't add religious overtones to the null hypothesis.

What else? Sandy was a tropical storm, not a huricane when it reached landfall. Super storms are even more rare, and given the low number it is difficult to tell if higher ocean temperatures had anything to do with it. The theory is as the earth gets warmer the theory goes these become less likely.

Finally the sea levels are rising. The last major huricane to hit where sandy hit was in 1938 and it was much stronger. The amount of people and expensive buildings have grown astronomically since 1938, because people forget that these things happen. Much of this construction was done not even taking into account how little above sea level things were being built. Storm surges will happen and cause great destruction when massive building is encouraged close to sea level.

Tropical storm karen is no big deal, and does not break from the historical record on how few huricanes we have had lately. I know some want to follow this as some religion, as if god or maya or hansen is punishing us for not signing the kyoto accord, but this is just blind superstition. It deserves to be pointed out, and those that are preaching it ridiculed. It is too easy give them a pass, all they need is one catastrophe, and they will claim to have always been right, even if these bad events happen less often.

One way to look at this cherry picking, is when you watch the news it seems murders are the worst they have ever been, and gun violence that must be going up. But the statistics show murders peaked in 1991 (murder rate peaked earlier but we had more people in 1991) and has steadily declined since then.

 

Okay, I'll try my best.

Africa is a source of easterly waves which move off the western coast of Africa into the eastern Atlantic. These are thus precursors to tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclones differ from mid-latitude cyclones (the "lows' typically depicted on TV weather maps over the CONUS) in that tropical cyclones are "warm-core" features, while mid-latitude cyclones are "cold-core" features. Tropical cyclones often transition to non-warm-core cyclones in the north Atlantic (i.e., they lose their "tropical characteristics").

I'm not really sure, but since the Southern Hemisphere has less land mass, there's probably less opportunity for land-based waves to form and move into open water where SSTs are favorable.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not really an expert in tropical meteorology, although I did work in Brownsville, TX, for a while (Hurricane "Brett" hit the southeastern TX coast while I was working there).

Does this help?

 

Plenty of modelers, grad student, government money, phds, etc looking to find connection between ENSO and temperature. I have read zilch, nada, about anyone doing this well. We have lots of people that have made predictions that are false, and maybe we can learn from those.

Remember, New Orleans was always a likely target of a hurricane (low lying, levies not built properly, etc). Instead of restoring wetlands, and improving the levies, Louisiana got federal money to build a deep water port. A signature drink of the city of new orleans is the huricane, Pre-Sandy many talked about a sea wall for NYC. Government simply encouraged more development with that deep water port and low cost insurance. Its not that government isn't doing the right things, they are actively doing the wrong thing.
Army Corps Envisioned Hurricane Walls for NYC 50 Years Ago - WNYC

$700M seems pretty cheap compared to sandy, but remember there are politicians that wanted it to happen, but many more that don't believe that likely storms should be mitigated. These would not have prevented all the sandy damage but the majority of the $65B.

In my own state houston was built where it is, because galviston was destroyed by a hurricane. Galviston was rebuilt, but at low density, knowing it would get hit again. When it was destroyed a second time, low cost federal insurance has quickly rebuilt it, with more expensive buildings than before. The governor even squashed an environmental report that because of rising sea levels, it was even more likely to happen a third time. Texas politicians won't take federal money to expand medicaid, but are happy to take federal money to build in harms way.

 

2013, the 'HURDAT era', longer (but incomplete) historical observations, and then finally the proxies extending back 7000 years (the longest I've seen). It is from these that future predictions may be built. Longer is obviously time-better, but weaker in details.

A variety of conclusions have been drawn from recent decades, and to me that seems not long enough. I have looked at only a few sediment proxies, and due to thread-starter fatigue, not doing that here. But I want you to know that every local sediment proxy study I have seen shows multi-century periods where strong storms were more numerous than current. Perhaps someone else would wish to distill that topic for PC's hungry minds.