Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue has released the latest hurricane frequency data updated through September 2012 showing a continuation of depressed global major hurricane numbers.
He announced on Twitter today:
Still going down, global major hurricane numbers during last 12-months: 15 (hint, it’s negative PDO climate change)
The data since 1978 with trends:
The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) for the North Atlantic for this year compared to other years — the season just went over 100 with long-lived fish-storm Nadine. During the last 30-years, the season has averaged an ACE of about 104. However, with recent unfavorable MJO conditions, Nadine was the only show in town (helpful when GOES-13 is on the fritz).
The Accumulated Cyclone Energy dissipated by tropical cyclones worldwide this year (2012) is near-normal across the board from the Northern Hemisphere, and was below normal for the Southern Hemisphere during the last season (Fall 2011-Spring 2012). Globally, ACE is below normal for this year.
See more at Maue’s website here.
Not being a fan in linear and linear “detrending” I thought storms may more logically be associated with actual sea temps. So hear is comparison to the same AMO data without the detrending. In fact the removed “trend” was not that significant.
http://i50.tinypic.com/o6ir88.png
What this does show is a rapid dislocation of the two data sets around 1925.
AMO is based on Kaplan which is based on Met Office Hadley reworking of the GOSTA data set:
“This data set is produced by taking the the MOHSST5 version of the GOSTA data set from the U.K. MET office as the input SST data ”
I think the dislocation tells us more about Hadley processing or a problem in the underlying SST data that it tells us about storms. It would be interesting to see if there was a “bias correction” applied about that time.
I have much more faith in independent physical data like storms than speculative adjustments based on speculative guesses about what buckets sailors were using to collect water. But that’s for another days.
The key point here is that the vast majority of the variation in storm energy is a reflection of a 60-70 year oscillation is SST and the storm data suggests it’s not just the land data that has a spurious warming signal in the data.
In other words, Dr Ryan Maue adds weight to IPCC AR4 predictions of less frequency of hurricanes, but an increase in major hurricanes.
IPCC AR4 WG1: 10.3.6.3 Tropical Cyclones (Hurricanes)
“A synthesis of the model results to date indicates that, for a future warmer climate, coarse-resolution models show few consistent changes in tropical cyclones, with results dependent on the model, although those models do show a consistent increase in precipitation intensity in future storms. Higher-resolution models that more credibly simulate tropical cyclones project some consistent increase in peak wind intensities, but a more consistent projected increase in mean and peak precipitation intensities in future tropical cyclones. There is also a less certain possibility of a decrease in the number of relatively weak tropical cyclones, increased numbers of intense tropical cyclones and a global decrease in total numbers of tropical cyclones.”
J Bowers says:
October 4, 2012 at 1:58 am
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In other words, Dr Ryan Maue adds weight to IPCC AR4 predictions of less frequency of hurricanes, but an increase in major hurricanes.
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No , what Dr Ryan shows is that you can form all sorts of misguided ideas of “trends” by fitting straight lines to data that have got nothing to do with straight line behaviour. Both his plots went from rising to falling in the period shown.
Major huricanes peaked a bit later in that time window. Your comment is a pretty good example of how to draw the wrong conclusion by looking at inappropriate models (linear trend) to the data.
The plot I posted shows that there is a very strong correlation between Atlantic SST and total yearly accumulated cyclone energy (big and small).
http://i50.tinypic.com/o6ir88.png
And what the cyclone ACE data tells us is that there has beem a small increase in the recent peak above the level of the previous peaks.
It also suggests there was a problem with the temperature data that shows a spurious warming in the early 1920s.
Current attempts to make a series of “corrections” to warm up surface temp records and then wail about increasing storm risk go against the evidence of very little increase is storms that *by their own logic* suggests surface temps have increased far less than their rigged data indicate.