50 years ago, we’d never have counted this as a tropical storm. As outlined recently in New peer reviewed study: Surge in North Atlantic hurricanes due to better detectors, not climate change, its the technology that enables counting storms that would not have been counted before. Ditto for tornadoes and sunspots.
From NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center via Eurekalert:
NASA and NOAA satellite video shows Tropical Storm Beatriz fizzle in 6 hours
Satellite data from NASA and NOAA showed that Tropical Storm Beatriz went from a strong tropical storm to a remnant low pressure area in six short hours after running into Mexico’s western mountains. An animation of imagery from the GOES-11 satellite showed how quickly Beatriz fizzled.
The animation of imagery from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-11 was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It shows satellite imagery in 15 minute intervals from June 20 at 13:00 UTC (9 a.m. EDT/6 a.m. PDT) until June 22 at 1315 UTC (9:15 a.m. EDT/6:15 a.m. PDT) as Beatriz battered southwestern Mexico’s coastline and weakened quickly.
GOES-11 captures imagery of weather over the western half of the U.S. continually, every day. GOES-11 is managed by NOAA and provides forecasters with visible and infrared imagery of weather systems.
According to reports from Agence-France Presse, Beatriz downed trees and left flooding in her wake. Coastal areas reporting flooding include Acapulco and Huatulco, in Oaxaca state.
At 5 p.m. EDT on June 21, Beatriz had maximum sustained winds near 60 mph, and as Beatriz interacted with the mountainous terrain of Mexico its strength waned quickly.
By 11 p.m. EDT the center of circulation was no longer well-defined and maximum sustained winds dropped to 30 mph. It was a quick drop in strength over six hours and transformed Beatriz from a strong tropical storm to a weak tropical depression. At that time her center was located near 19.0 North latitude and 107.0 West longitude and moving westward near 10 mph (17 kmh).
Today, June 22, Beatriz’ remnants are slowly moving over cooler sea surface temperatures. As a result, the low pressure area has a slim chance of regenerating because temperatures of at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit are needed to maintain a tropical cyclone, and these waters are near or below that threshold.
As of 8 a.m. EDT today, Beatriz’ remnants were about 175 miles southwest of Cabo Corrientes, Mexico. The National Hurricane Center noted today that the chance for regeneration is now “near zero.”
NASA’s Hurricane Page: www.nasa.gov/hurricane
The longer you watch the ocean, the more likely you are to see a big wave and conclude that the height of ocean waves is increasing with time. Since CO2 is also increasing, it must be the CO2 that is making the waves get bigger. The only problem is they would behave the same way without CO2, but of course that doesn’t matter. What matters is the when it rains my knee hurts, thus my knee is causing the rain.
good point
the instruments are getting better
mercury wasn’t found in tuna-fish till the spectrometers got the sensitivity to fine it in parts per billion
still knowing more does not say anything up down sidewises or inside out
A thousand years ago everybody knew the sun went round the earth once a day
we human don’t have any idea what is going on
the sky is falling ??!?!?
jim
With the current state of the temperatures of the North Atlantic http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-110619.gif is everyone still convinced that we will see a ‘busy year’ for hurricanes?
Busy, yes, there will probably be 15 named storms or so, but that’s only because of increased shorties. The AMO is positive, a weakening La Nina present. The majority of the named storms will be hurricanes, and more than half will be major hurricanes. High ACE this year
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/anomnight.current.gif
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2005/anomnight.6.21.2005.gif
I don’t expect 2005, not even close but as you can see they are very similar. Notice the cold PDO signature in the Pacific…
TS H MH ACE
1950 13 11 8 243
1954 11 8 3 113
1955 13 11 6 199
1964 12 6 6 170
1995 19 11 5 227
1998 14 10 3 182
1999 12 8 5 177
2000 15 8 3 116
2008 16 8 5 145
2010 19 12 5 160
Avg 14.4 9.3 4.9 173.2
La Nina, cold pdo, warm amo averages
I forgot 1996- 13 9 6 166. Also, include the entire warm AMO in here (1995-pres)
You know, I remember Leif repeating over and over here at WUWT that there was no issue with the sunspot counts, despite the improvements in detection. But I swear these SIDC numbers are fiction:
http://sidc.oma.be/images/wolfjmms.png
If you look at that plot, the yellow is daily. You see the yellow hanging out in the 30-50 range for most of the past 30 days, which simply cannot be true. I personally saw a week span that saw at least one day of blank sun, and a week or so around that where the count by my eye would only be around 10 each day at the most (there was only one sunspot group traversing the visible portion and it only contained 1-2 major sunspots). This plot comes up every day for me (Firefox Morning Coffee plugin), so I do check. Perhaps there are other sunspot counts that mirror this or contradict it, I’m not sure, but I find myself disagreeing with sunspot count numbers that I see.
Tell me I’m wrong Leif.
Satellite imagery and other forms of pictures give us the ability to document storms that were never known or were anecdotal accounts. But it still takes the media and press releases to make these things known and the press does choose what it reports on.
I have seen few stories about the huge snowpack still left in the mountains and just small blips about it when talking about flooding. Glacier still has alot of snow on the Going to the Sun road and these pictures are really impressive for the last week of June.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/glaciernps
Speaking of flooding…where was all the melting snowpack that is mentioned in the Minot flooding. I can’t seem to find any snow anywhere in that drainage and it seems like the dams were left too full to account for the amount of rain that part of the world has gotten this spring.
Very similar to SpotGate, in which it has been revealed that NASA are counting sunspots that don’t last a day, the historical “standard” for adding one to the total. So there are far fewer spots and storms than the official stats claim.
It’s not as worse as they said they thought!
They need to pace themselves… what if they start out counting the shorties and a busy season actually happens?
Ditto for tornadoes and sunspots
Surely for tornadoes, but definitely not for sunspots. The sunspot counters go to great length to compensate for evolving technology [or rather: ignore it]. The sunspot number is today determined using instruments deliberately not better than 19th century technology. In fact, the very same telescope Rudolf Wolf used in the mid 19th century is still used today to verify that the modern count is not inflated by modern technology [if anything the SIDC count has been a bit too low since about 2000] http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-80mm-Telescope.png and here is it in use today http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-80mm.jpg
In the 1870s-1890s, Wolf used exclusively much smaller telescopes http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-Handhelds.jpg also still in use today: http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-37mm.jpg. To compensate for the smaller telescope Wolf multiplied all his counts by 1.5 to match what he would have seen with the larger telescope. Modern technology has not polluted the sunspot count.
Jeremy says:
June 23, 2011 at 12:50 pm
Tell me I’m wrong Leif.
You are, indeed, wrong.
You see the yellow hanging out in the 30-50 range for most of the past 30 days, which simply cannot be true.
The correct average for the past 30 days is 41, so the yellow is spot on. What you are missing is that the sunspot number is calculated as the number of groups times 10 plus the number of spots, so if there are precisely three widely dispersed spots [thus in three independent active regions or ‘groups’] the sunspot number is three groups times ten plus three spots for a grand total of 3*10+3=33. This has to be scaled down for historical reasons by a factor of 0.6, but you get the picture.
Lawrence of Arabia make a great observation in his “seven pilliars of wisdom” that he who controls the dispatches largely determines the heroes in war.
If you are making predictions based on temperature, it helps to control the temperature records.
If you are making predictions based on sunspot counts, it helps to control the sunspot records.
Over time this has been observed to increase the accuracy of predictions.
In most professions there is a clear separation of duties to prevent bias and collusion from contaminating the results. However climate science and solar science are “special”.
It’s not just naming “shorties”, they also re-name storms…
the same system can have two names now….
Hurricane – depression – runs into another cloud – hurricane with new name
Brian Hall says:
June 23, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Very similar to SpotGate, in which it has been revealed that NASA are counting sunspots that don’t last a day, the historical “standard” for adding one to the total. So there are far fewer spots and storms than the official stats claim.
Not so, the one-day rule is NOAAs rule for given the spot a number, not for counting it. There is no such rule, on the contrary, the historical rule is that you [Wolf in this case] only observe ONCE a day and count what you see at that single occasion. Both NOAA and SIDC are sinners in this regard as they lump in counts by many observers, the argument being that a short-lived spot seen by one observer will not live long enough to be counted by another one who might also count a short-lived one that the first didn’t see. In the end it doesn’t really matter, because the count is adjusted to match the [yearly] count of the real keeper of the sunspot number, the gentleman on the left here: http://www.leif.org/research/Sergio-and-Me.jpg
So the historical scaling factor comes after that? What you’re saying is that spots have always been “counted” this way? Why / how was it determined to multiply groups by ten then add? Sounds like counting is not what is being done, It should be renamed ‘Sunspot product’. 🙂
CodeTech-“They need to pace themselves… what if they start out counting the shorties and a busy season actually happens?”
First, The Eastern North Pacific basin is not likely to be very active, at least if the NATL predictions of a busy season is close to correct. Second of all, these are definitely tropical storms and should be recorded as such. The only real problem is that we would have missed them in the past, so one must account for this in historical comparisons. Using a duration cutoff is helpful to determine the role these play in distorting the trends.
ferd berple says:
June 23, 2011 at 1:58 pm
If you are making predictions based on sunspot counts, it helps to control the sunspot records.
[…] However climate science and solar science are “special”.
You are completely wrong on the sunspot part. For one, it is not the same people who observe and predict, further you should not smear people you do not know, shame on you.
Your vote required here.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4834615/Scientists-give-chilling-warnings-on-climate
Jeremy says:
June 23, 2011 at 2:12 pm
So the historical scaling factor comes after that? What you’re saying is that spots have always been “counted” this way? Why / how was it determined to multiply groups by ten then add? Sounds like counting is not what is being done, It should be renamed ‘Sunspot product’. 🙂
The story is this:
When Rudolf Wolf designed the Sunspot Number he used a different name for it: the relative number, meant to signify that is was a sort of code and not the actual number of spots. One should better call it the “Wolf Number”. The rationale for the formula was that a new sunspot group was a much more [say, 10 times] important event than a new small spot among the twenty other ones in an old group. The scaling factor comes from the decision in 1893 [after Wolf died] to count even the smallest spots which Wolf did not do [because he wanted to be compatible with the discoverer of the sunspot cycle Schwabe, who didn’t count those]. If you count the smallest sports that were not counted before, the sunspot number becomes too high, so you have to knock it down a bit, hence the 0.6 if you want to keep the same scale.
Back to storm counts. One of the reasons for such intense scrutiny of every single low pressure system is the amount of money television stations invest so that they can be the first to report on it. Look at this from our local Fox News station in Tampa: http://www.myfoxhurricane.com
Of course for those of us living within range it is nice to know we have some place to check things out during hurricane season.
OH NO THE HURRICANES ARE GETTING SHORTER WHAT DOES IT MEAN??????
It was a cat 1 hurricane at full strength according to NOAA.
Its a classic problem , improvements in technology lead to increase in the number of an item over time not becasue there are more of them but you can now count them much more effectively .
KnR says:
June 23, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Its a classic problem , improvements in technology lead to increase in the number of an item over time not becasue there are more of them but you can now count them much more effectively
Except the sunspots.
I conducted an experiment tonight investigating whether the date of the first hurricane or named storm has anything to do with the number of named storms expected in the year.
I could determine no significant trend at all! Frankly, I was floored.
Here is the sample using the storms from
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/hurdat/tracks1851to2010_atl_reanal.txt
Grouped into the past 31, 61, and 160 year sets
Column A: the date of the storm of the year.
Column B, C, D are formated as
Number of Storms per year | Number of years where the first storm was on that day or later.
Column B covers 1980-2010,
Column C covers 1950-2010,
Column D covers all years in the nhc database.
*A”————– “B” ————- “C” ———- “D”
Date_____30yr text_____60yr text________ 160yr text
01/01_____ 12.0| 31_____ 10.9| 61________ 9.0| 160
05/01_____ 12.0| 29_____ 10.9| 57________ 9.0| 155
05/10_____ 11.9| 27_____ 10.8| 55________ 8.9| 152
05/20_____ 11.9| 27_____ 10.9| 53________ 8.7| 145
06/01_____ 11.9| 25_____ 10.9| 48________ 8.6| 136
06/05_____ 11.6| 24_____ 10.7| 44________ 8.5| 130
06/08_____ 11.9| 23_____ 10.8| 43________ 8.6| 127
06/11_____ 11.2| 21_____ 10.5| 40________ 8.4| 121
06/15_____ 11.2| 20_____ 10.6| 36________ 8.4| 108
06/19_____ 11.5| 17_____ 10.8| 33________ 8.3| 100
06/23_____ 11.5| 17_____ 11.0| 31________ 8.3| 93
06/27_____ 11.1| 15_____ 10.7| 27________ 8.1| 84
07/01_____ 11.6| 13_____ 10.9| 25________ 8.3| 80
07/05_____ 11.6| 13_____ 10.8| 24________ 8.2| 73
07/09_____ 11.6| 13_____ 10.8| 24________ 8.3| 71
07/13_____ 11.6| 13_____ 10.8| 24________ 8.3| 69
07/17_____ 11.6| 11_____ 10.8| 22________ 8.2| 65
07/21_____ 11.6| 11_____ 10.8| 21________ 8.2| 64
07/25_____ 11.4| 10_____ 10.7| 19________ 8.0| 60
07/29_____ 11.1| 09_____ 10.1| 17________ 7.7| 57
08/02_____ 10.8| 08_____ 9.8| 13________ 7.4| 46
08/06_____ 8.8| 05_____ 8.6| 10________ 6.8| 39
08/11_____ 9.3| 03_____ 8.6| 07________ 6.5| 29
08/15_____ 8.5| 02_____ 7.2| 05________ 6.0| 25
08/17_____ 13.0| 01_____ 8.0| 04________ 6.0| 23
08/22_____ .0| 00_____ 6.3| 03________ 5.2| 14
for instance take Aug, 11, there are three years in the past 30 where the first named storm happened on or after Aug. 11: They were 1980, 1983, and 1984, with 11, 4, and 13 storms.
Today, on June 23, about half of the previous years would have had their first storm by now. Even so, it makes little difference in the number of storms to be expected in the rest of the year. It is not the way I would have bet.
I have not stratified for AMO state or USA Landfalls.
In about 5 hours a Tsunami could strike the PNW from a just in 7.4 mag quake in the Aleutians, if a Tsunami forms.
rb;
Nope, a tsunami has been waved off. So sorry, no walking walls of water today! ;(
The media has to share most of the blame. Bad news days serve to urge these people to find a scare story and the latest storm, regardless of size or route, is a good bet.
I am a great believer that we are given a false impression that the number of extreme weather events is increasing due to nothing more than better news coverage and to some extent better instrumentation with higher resolution etc.
Given the increased observational data available due to satelitte telemetry etc, a better metric for comparison purposes (comparing like with historical like) is comparing the number of landfalls.
One reason why the Bermuda Triangle myth gained such traction was that MSM would take a look out of the window and see fine weather. They would then assume that a boat or aircraft that went missing 500 miles away would have been in good conditions too, when in fact it might have been in a major storm. Still, simple bad weather doesn’t sell papers like a good old fashioned alien invasion.
In 2006, Tropical Storm Ernesto became a hurricane for a few hours while off the coast of Haiti. It then weakened to a tropical storm and never regained hurricane status. It’s maximum sustained wind speed was 75 mph.
8/27/06 5AM 70 mph tropical storm
8/27/06 11AM 75 mph Cat 1 hurricane
8/27/06 5PM 60 mph tropical storm
A simple interpolation suggests that hurricane status lasted less than 2 hours. I emailed NOAA at the time and asked whether it was likely that Ernesto would have been designated as a hurricane back in the 50’s or 60’s. Public affairs officer Frank Lepore promptly responded “Short answer to your question is yes Ernesto would have been identified as a hurricane in the 1950 and 60’s both through aerial reconnaissance and ship observations.”
Sounded like very wishful thinking to me. There must have been lots of planes and ships around to make it “likely” that they would detect a shortie among shorties.