Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. had this great set of factoids up on his blog, and I just can’t resist sharing. He writes:
Adam Lea, of University College London, shares these interesting hurricane factoids related the the remarkable dearth of US hurricane landfalls in recent years. His comments are reproduced here with his permission:
As the 2010 hurricane season (with 10 hurricanes) starts to wind down I thought I would share a few statistics on how unusual this season has been historically for its lack of US hurricane landfalls:
1. Since 1900 there is no precedent of an Atlantic hurricane season with 10 or more hurricanes where none has struck the US as a hurricane. The five previous seasons with 10 or more hurricanes each had at least two hurricane strikes on the US.
2. The last precedent for a La Nina year of the magnitude of 2010 which had no US-landfalling hurricane is 1973.
3. Since hurricane Ike (2008) there have been 16 consecutive non US-landfalling hurricanes. Such a sequence last happened between Irene (1999) and Lili (2002) with 22 consecutive non US-landfalling hurricanes, and between Allen (1980) and Alicia (1983) with 17 consecutive non US-landfalling hurricanes.
4. The period 2006-2010 is one of only three 5-year consecutive periods without a US major hurricane landfall (the other two such periods were 1901-1905 and 1936-1940). There has never been a six year period without a US major hurricane landfall.
5. Historically one in four Atlantic hurricanes strike the US as a hurricane. Thus the recent dearth in strikes should be ‘corrected’ in the next few years.
Give him some traffic, comment here. Dr. Pielke adds in another post:
The 2006-2010 RMS Hurricane Damage Forecast
(All data is from the ICAT Damage Estimator, total damages shown.)
Read the entire post here: The 2006-2010 RMS Hurricane Damage Forecast
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Let me add a couple of points of interest to the already impressive set of facts.
The last Category 5 hurricane to strike the USA was hurricane Andrew in 1992. Many people think Katrina in 2005 made landfall as a CAT5 when it hit New Orleans. Not true.
From the National Hurricane Center (NHC) Hurricane History page:
This horrific tropical cyclone formed from the combination of a tropical wave, an upper-level trough, and the mid-level remnants of Tropical Depression Ten. A tropical depression formed on August 23 about 200 miles southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas. Moving northwestward, it became Tropical Storm Katrina during the following day about 75 miles east-southeast of Nassau. The storm moved through the northwestern Bahamas on August 24-25, and then turned westward toward southern Florida. Katrina became a hurricane just before making landfall near the Miami-Dade/Broward county line during the evening of August 25. The hurricane moved southwestward across southern Florida into the eastern Gulf of Mexico on August 26. Katrina then strengthened significantly, reaching Category 5 intensity on August 28. Later that day, maximum sustained winds reached 175 mph with an aircraft-measured central pressure of 902 mb while centered about 195 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Katrina turned to the northwest and then north, with the center making landfall near Buras, Louisiana at 1110 UTC August 29 with maximum winds estimated at 125 mph (Category 3). Continuing northward, the hurricane made a second landfall near the Louisiana/Mississippi border at 1445 UTC with maximum winds estimated at 120 mph (Category 3). Weakening occurred as Katrina moved north-northeastward over land, but it was still a hurricane near Laurel, Mississippi. The cyclone weakened to a tropical depression over the Tennessee Valley on 30 August. Katrina became an extratropical low on August 31 and was absorbed by a frontal zone later that day over the eastern Great Lakes.
The last hurricane to make landfall on the USA was Hurricane IKE, on Sept 13th, 2008. As of today, we now have 773 days since then. It is likely that we may see this extend to June 1st of next year, the official start of hurricane season when it will be 991 days. And if there is no US landfalling hurricane in the 9 days after that, it will hit 1000 days. Chances are good that this will happen.
The longest period of time the US went without a landfalling category 3 hurricane was from August 1999 with hurricane Bret CAT3, to August 2004 with hurricane Charley CAT4, a period of 5 years.
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…
The hurricane season will officially end at the end of November. As of now there has been 17 named storms. It is still 2 storms short of Micheal Mann’s prediction for the lowest number for 2010. Time is on his side… for the moment.
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/research/Hurricane2010.html
Its worse than we thought!
Andy K the climate changes every day.Always has always will.Just because a hurricane doesn’t go over an area doesn’t mean you can’t have effects from it.I read ,onWatts UpWithThat, recently where hurricans and tropical storms can cool the waters of the Atlantic ,Gulf of Mexico just to name a few area this has happened this year.
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
4. The period 2006-2010 is one of only three 5-year consecutive periods without a US major hurricane landfall (the other two such periods were 1901-1905 and 1936-1940). There has never been a six year period without a US major hurricane landfall.
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No one can tell me, or any sane mind, or the flattened Bolivar Peninsula for that matter, that Ike was not a major hurricane.
Sorry, but 2006 – 2010 WAS interrupted by a major landfalling US hurricane in 2008.
Time to drop the Saffir Simpson false construct.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Not happy with factoid? Try factlet.
Mr. Day: Thank you for that. I’d forgotten about Lysenko.
Lol, no one can answer the question?
Statistics? Try the law of probabilty.
Play a bit of poker, learn about random distributions. “Wow, what a great deck of cards. Last three hands I got dealt 6 hearts. The trend is towards hearts.”
Random distributions typically, however they are plotted, have “clumps”.
The future can not be projected from what happened in the past. All the “smoothing” does is hide history, except that thinking that temperatures measured in the past are accurate is the height of foolishness.
The rotation of the Earth on its axis does warm the atmosphere by causing the winds to “blow”, i.e., produces kinetic energy, which ends up as heat energy in the atmosphere due to friction. And the rotation largely causes the “winds to blow”. Other causes of winds are rather minor in comparison.
How disruptive of the climate to behave in this underhand, unexpected manner. How very dare it!
For those who missed it, even the latest five year run without a single hurricane strike on the U.S. didn’t prevent Kevin Trenberth and Joe Romm from claiming that heavy rains produced by the remnants of tropical storm Nicole were ‘an extreme climate event’ caused by CAGW:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/09/30/north-carolina-500-year-rainfall-deluge-global-warming/
In the post Trenberth is quoted:
“I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
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.
This is only happening because of global climate disruption. We have altered the way hurricanes think.
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?
Anthony:
Your post, “Ocean color affects tropical cyclone formation” (10/6/10), reported a study of chlorophyll concentrations affecting the formation rate and paths of cyclones in the subtropical North Pacific.
Presumably, more CO2 has increased the biosphere world wide. Are researchers drawing any correlations about impacts of increased chlorophyll on hurricanes in the Atlantic? Is the albedo of our oceans also changing by the increased chlorophyll?
Hope all is now well with your wife and home.
Brian
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.
I don’t under the title of this article “Inconvenient Hurricane Facts”. What is inconvenient about hurricanes not making landfall? Does this disprove some claim? I’m not trying to argue, I’m just unclear.
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…
Thom says on October 27, 2010 at 5:49 am
Yes, and pretty soon we are going to have an Antrhropogenic Climate Disruption Catastrophe! An AC/DC.
It’s a long way to the shop when you want a sausage roll!
“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. “
Andy K says: October 27, 2010 at 7:15 am
I don’t under the title of this article “Inconvenient Hurricane Facts”. What is inconvenient about hurricanes not making landfall? Does this disprove some claim? I’m not trying to argue, I’m just unclear.
Andy, I assume the title is an allusion to Gore’s, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, and the false prediction therein that hurricanes will be more frequent and stronger.
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.
Jose Suro
Thanks for showing me that, i did not realize that the NHC had a sheet on that.
So Earl would then be classified as an indirect hit on the US coast, but not a strike. so the strike streak is still continuing, but the US was hit by a hurricane this year then
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.