Inconvenient hurricane facts

[off topic, try tips and notes ~ ctm]

so will this year be the 110th lowest hurricane strike rate or maybe the warmists will twist it to be the ‘worst hurricane strike rate since records’ began! (in this case worst being the lowest! LOL)

Next time ask the prophet to be more accurate, otherwise, tell him, you won’t giving anymore alms to his Gaia Church.

While Earl didn’t ‘strike’ the US, it caused hurricane conditions. i guess the word ‘strike’ means that the eye makes landfall/the center passes over land?
SO even if in the future you have a Cat 5 pass just south of the Keys, causing a damaging storm surge and winds of a cat 3 or higher in Miami, as long as the storm center does not go over the keys, and then the center hits Mexico, and not the US, it’s not recorded as a strike though the US coast felt the wrath of it at least once if not twice? to me that would sound like the US was struck by Hurricane ____ even though it never made landfall.
Someone should define all the terms for describing hurricanes interracting with land (stike, landfall, impact, etc…) and come up with a universal way of describing what actually happens.

Why ruin a good story with facts !!!
Very interesting information.

Roy says: (October 26, 2010 at 2:32 pm) The term “factoid” is unfortunate as is it is wrongly used…
Worwhile comment, Roy. Owe you for noting it as one tends to let it slip by (with a slight mental grimace at such an ugly word). The following are two definitions from its use on the web which back up your point rather nicely; and confirm the value of your caution:
— something resembling a fact; unverified (often invented) information that is given credibility because it appeared in print
— a brief (usually one sentence and usually trivial) news item

October 24, 2010 by
“It has now been more than 750 days since any hurricane has made landfall in the US. This is one of the longest periods on record. Assuming that none do the rest of the current season, the quiesced period will almost certainly continue for at least 1,000 days.
The only three year period without hurricanes in US history was around the time of the Civil War.”
Steven Goddard

Chant it with me now. . . . “it’s still in the pipeline!”

Herbie Vandersmeldt says:
October 26, 2010 at 2:29 pm
If those scientists had commercial contracts for research they would probably have signed confidentiality agreements and would not be rushing off into the limelight of the press with their results.
If the government gives you a contract for research why should that automatically confer the freedom to run off to the press with the results? Surely, the government, as the contractor, has the final say as to whether the results can be divulged to the press, and in what form.

Well, I tried to respond to one of his threads, but Google has decided that they want more personal information in order to use my G-mail account as a post ID.
Google can pack sand, they know enough already.
My question/statement/opinion was about a hypothetical property insurance company using this “Risk Modeling Agency of the Year” (as ranked by Reactions™ magazine) data to base their billing tables on.
Since they seem to have missed it by a factor of three (over estimated), who get’s the money?

Robert, Earl didn’t quite bring hurricane conditions to the US, at least not according to the NHC as per their storm summary’s wind history here: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2010/graphics/al07/loop_S.shtml
Very close, but not quite.
“Strike” refers to hurricane conditions (sustained winds above 74mph for 1 minute), not the passage of the centre of the storm. In your example of a Cat 5 passing by the keys and bringing Cat 3 conditions to land, that would definitely be considered a strike on the US mainland.
All an irrelevance in terms of the AGW debate anyway, but the article does help give the lie to the warnings of impending doom due to the evil that men do…

Its worse than we thought!

Keith, I was referring to the fact that Joe Bastardi is scoring the impact on the outer banks as a minimal hurricane, thus a hurricane impact on land. But fair enough, the sustained winds didn’t quite make it onshore.
And i want the clarification because people next year will be claiming that it’s been so long since we’ve been (struck/hit/landfalling system/ whatever term they use)that statistically we must get hit this year, even though that’s not how statistics work. I was hoping that it would count, just so people don’t try and say ‘statistics say that this will happen’ or ‘this has to happen to fit to the statistics’ and predict a doomsday hurricane hitting the US because of it being statistically time. I can see warmists misusing the statistics if it stays as it is, and we get to 1000 days with no hurricane hitting the US

Not happy with factoid? Try factlet.

Lol, no one can answer the question?

the last ‘factoid’
“Thus the recent dearth in strikes should be ‘corrected’ in the next few years.”
seems to me to be misleading. The climate doesn’t have memory; it doesn’t know it needs to improve its batting average. Or if there is a memory of sorts, without knowing how that memory process works, we could just as easily posit that the recent dearth is the result of too many strikes in the past.

I cannot find any reference to hurricanes in descriptions of AOGCM’s, yet any calculation of the energy they dissipate soon gets to be ExaJoules galore, even for quite small Category 2 ones. I recognise that the grid sizes in AOGCMs may be too small to model a modest hurricane, but shouldn’t those who seek to tell us where all the solar energy goes take hurricane energy into account?

I always think that caution is appropriate with these sorts of statistics. If we had no hurricanes hit recently, it was just luck. Soon enough, we’ll have hurricanes hit, maybe big, bad and frequent ones: bad luck. Similarly for Arctic sea ice. It can range from above average to near record lows in as little as three months. One tends to seek vindication in these short term trends, but they are unsuitable for such a purpose and will come back to haunt the believer.
The UAH anomaly, now that’s a statistic. And it’s running hot. So let’s see what October brings. It’s been unusually warm in New York all month long.

October 26, 2010 at 5:38 pm …
Richard, I just found out that Vince probably or possibly was not the first hurricane to
make landfall at the Iberian peninsula…A BAMS article about a hurriane?! in late
October 1842…About Vince “Interestingly, and in contrast to the NHC, the
Spanish National Institute of Meteorology (INM
2005), after an analysis based on satellite imagery
and high-resolution observations from the area,
categorized Vince as a midlatitude mesocyclone that
developed from a cutoff low as early as 7 October.
Such systems have cold cores, often leading to intense
convection, and are created in situations in which
the upper westerlies assume a very low zonal index.
Nieto et al. (2005) provide a useful account of cutoff
low climatology. Storms resulting from cutoff lows
and low zonality of the upper westerlies are by no
means unknown in this area. Such situations are of
sufficient frequency and consistency of character to
be widely recognized as a synoptic “type.” Several
such occurrences can be expected each year, with
a peak incidence in autumn (Met Office 1978). The
most well known, and possibly one of the most severe
of such events of the nineteenth century, was the
so-called Trafalgar storm that followed the famous
battle (Wheeler 2001); although described by one
sea captain as a “hurricane,” it is almost certain that
it was a cutoff feature of a wholly extratropical character
and, having persisted for 7 days, was a storm of
remarkable persistence and ferocity.” SST’s for Vince were 23-24C…
And then we had TS “Grace”…[“Amazing Grace”…] in NE Atlantic 2009…
Robbie Berg at NHC: ”
The transition from extratropical low to tropical storm does not include a subtropical stage because the surface low had already separated from the upper-level low and had a small radius of maximum winds by the time the convection became organized and persistent enough to satisfy the definition of a tropical or subtropical cyclone.
Records indicate that no other cyclone has become a tropical storm as far northeast over the Atlantic Ocean as did Grace. However, it is important to note that prior to the beginning of routine Dvorak classifications in 1972—and before the advent of scatterometry—it would have been difficult to identify and assess the intensity of tropical cyclones in this part of the Atlantic basin.” [However…] Hmmm…Met Office’s articles
about Moroccan vortices seem hard to find but MO still provides some 15 factsheets
about UHI!! amongst others…and white Christmases…

“Robert says:
October 26, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Someone should define all the terms for describing hurricanes interracting with land (stike, landfall, impact, etc…) and come up with a universal way of describing what actually happens.”
It’s all here:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutgloss.shtml
Strike:
“For any particular location, a hurricane strike occurs if that location passes within the hurricane’s strike circle, a circle of 125 n mi diameter, centered 12.5 n mi to the right of the hurricane center (looking in the direction of motion). This circle is meant to depict the typical extent of hurricane force winds, which are approximately 75 n mi to the right of the center and 50 n mi to the left.”
Landfall:
“The intersection of the surface center of a tropical cyclone with a coastline. Because the strongest winds in a tropical cyclone are not located precisely at the center, it is possible for a cyclone’s strongest winds to be experienced over land even if landfall does not occur. Similarly, it is possible for a tropical cyclone to make landfall and have its strongest winds remain over the water. Compare direct hit, indirect hit, and strike.”
Direct hit:
“A close approach of a tropical cyclone to a particular location. For locations on the left-hand side of a tropical cyclone’s track (looking in the direction of motion), a direct hit occurs when the cyclone passes to within a distance equal to the cyclone’s radius of maximum wind. For locations on the right-hand side of the track, a direct hit occurs when the cyclone passes to within a distance equal to twice the radius of maximum wind. Compare indirect hit, strike.”
Indirect Hit:
“Generally refers to locations that do not experience a direct hit from a tropical cyclone, but do experience hurricane force winds (either sustained or gusts) or tides of at least 4 feet above normal. “

Inconvenient? Al Gore; 2005
“There are scientific warnings now of another onrushing catastrophe. We were warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda; we didn’t respond. We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn’t respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us that the average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global warming. A scientist at MIT has published a study well before this tragedy showing that since the 1970s, hurricanes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration, and in intensity, by about 50 %. The newscasters told us after Hurricane Katrina went over the southern tip of Florida that there was a particular danger for the Gulf Coast of the hurricanes becoming much stronger because it was passing over unusually warm waters in the gulf. The waters in the gulf have been unusually warm. The oceans generally have been getting warmer. And the pattern is exactly consistent with what scientists have predicted for twenty years. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming. It is important to learn the lessons of what happens when scientific evidence and clear authoritative warnings are ignored in order to induce our leaders not to do it again and not to ignore the scientists again and not to leave us unprotected in the face of those threats that are facing us right now.”
Inconvenient? The intensity of hurricanes has not increased. The “average” hurricane has not gotten stronger. The catastrophe has not occurred; particularly on the US coastline. Does this mean that increased CO2 makes the world safer for us? Ridiculous you say. No more ridiculous than Al’s quote above.

I understand the allusion to Gore’s book, but I don’t understand the suggestion of hurricane strength being related to making landfall (the subject of the article). Is this article implying that hurricanes not making landfall are inherently weaker? I haven’t heard this correlation.

Roy says: October 26, 2010 at 2:32 pm
The term “factoid” is unfortunate as is it is wrongly used (here, and almost everywhere else that it appears). It doesn’t mean “a small fact”. I believe the term was coined by Norman Mailer who used it to mean a falsehood which has achieved the status of truth by sheer repetition.
So, CAGW is a factoid.
Ouch!! Right or wrong I don’t like the way that sounds.