2013 Lack of Hurricanes

Interesting, I've found this reference suggesting finding the global storm rates in the satellite era is feasible:

Source: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

This makes sense as the first generation of polar orbiting, weather satellites, the TIROS series, were replaced in the 1970s by the second and subsequent generations. It still gives a 43 year range that also corresponds to a 0.5-0.6 C increase in global temperature. This gives hope that satellite data may have the numbers. Better still, the subsequent, polar satellites included IR metrics. So all it takes is summing the areas above a given temperature threshold and voila, a reasonable metric for global storm activity.

But while looking, I found this interesting, Southeast USA, tide record study:

Source: http://www.skyfall.fr/wp-content/2012/10/grinstead-pnas-2012.pdf

Interesting the correlation between warm and cold years and the severity storm surges as recorded in tidal gauges. This is consistent with more heat, more severe storms only in this case, based upon warm and cold years. So far, this one paper shows severe weather seems to follow a pattern consistent with warming increasing the frequency. For our innumeracy friends, 'frequency' in this case means a statistical probability. Even a loaded dice will through strange numbers from time-to-time.

Bob Wilson

 

Perhaps we could just now for the moment look inside ourselves to find a way to help Philippines. This is a big deal.

Later we can sort out big events and where they happen and all that stuff that might relate to directional climate change. And we can enjoy the textures of our disagreement in pure PC style. But not today.

 

I duno ... if one hurricane / typhoon sufficiently makes up for a diminished average (even if it's a record setting wind speed) . . . . . . but I continue to wonder why it matters. So - what if it's our carbon ... or what if it's not. We reduce fuel consumption (more renewables) and collaterally we save fuel and simultaneously drop carbon. If we can do that . . . then maybe we can move on past the whole sea level increased storm thing. No?
.

 

BTW, some of my Huntsville neighbors are experts in this field:

NASA MSFC Earth Science Office



Weather satellites have been capturing these IR images of the earth since the 1970s. The coldest spots (reds, yellows) are the highest clouds associated with rain. Assuming no one has thrown out the data:

• adjust the parallax to compensate for altitude and earth curvature
• sum the areas into temperature buckets across a time boundary, daily
  • ~15,298 daily summaries (2012-1970)*364.25
• ~0.6-0.7C global warming << thermal buckets, no significant effect on thermal buckets

If we find the distribution of thermal buckets show a decrease in the area covered by these tall clouds, the hypothesis that rain, storm activity has decreased, is shown false. Apparently global warming has no effect in water circulation patterns and thus no detectable effect on weather.

Any problems with this approach?

Bob Wilson

 

Short term only way to help the philippines is cash. If that is your best choice for charity do it.
Long term, they are screwed by weather, if their government doesn't change things. This is the place for big ocean storms, and the buildings are not built for these storms that have happened throughout history. Now we have tv cameras so it looks worse.

If you want to see human caused deaths, right now Syria is the place. About 5 times more inocent woman and children have died from military attacks, than total people in typhoon dealths. There are over 100,000 refugees living in camps. These refugees have a worse plight than the typhoon victims that have lost their homes, but somehow we want to blame people for the weather, and ignore places where blame is more easily assigned.

Absolutel hill it does not, in fact we may be having less frequent major huricanes because of ghg. If the issue is that we need to stop to prevent major huricanes and typhoons, and it turns out ghg reduce the numbers, then do we burn more oil to save people from the storms? Twisted bad logic.

Now there are much better reasons to cut oil use, national security, economic security, oil related pollution that I just don't get the idea that we should cut use to reduce extreme weather. When the ties are so weak, why would you lead with that. Then you get oil industry folks telling you that conversions to plug-ins will increase ghg, and we must prevent this;-) Its a twisted route.

 

Population evacuations in advance are the most important in limiting casualty. A lot of coastal 'soft' construction goes down, but that was fated on the day it was built. Wrong thing in the wrong place. We have basically heard nothing yet about inland landslides on steeplands. As there had been a local recent large earthquake, one would expect that.

It was amazing that evacuations in Phil' were as large as they were. The country is divided into a very large number of islands. Not the ideal set up for rapid population transfers. It undoubtedly reduced loss of life, but in retrospect, a complete evacuation of Leyte might have been the best plan.

Meanwhile Vietnam had a similarly sized evacuation, and got lucky (towards the end) with a recurvature of the storm. This leads to the secondary problem, when you evacuate people once too often and then they ignore the following evacuation order.

So, I think evacuations are essential. If somehow warm ocean water, or wind shear or ENSO lead to less cyclogenesis, that will mean less calls for evacuations.

 

Agreed, early detection and prediction along with proper building and evacuation are the best way to minimize death and injuries.

Even if ghg reduce the numbers of major huricanes, the amount decrease is likely to be small, while higher sea levels mean that storm surges are more likely. In the 60s the army corps of engineers proposed building a sea wall to protect NYC from an event that would happen maybe once or twice in a hundred years. People balked at the price. It did take awhile, and now those old plans are being looked at again.

 

Even the Mediterranean can host cyclones, although rarely. Sardinia just received one. I have seen no records of them prior to 1995. This has been a rather densely populated region - one wonders how they could have gone uniformly unnoticed for...thousands of years there.

 

Maybe because volcanos and earthquakes make a windy day seem mild by comparison? Most areas by the coast are close to high ground close to Italy, including Sardinia. Now places like the Nile Delta would be a very different story.

 

No major hurricanes, a total of two formed compared to an average of six and 13 possible hurricanes spun up which is one more than average.

2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season Closes Without Any Major Hurricanes