While there is still lots of caterwauling about Hurricane Sandy and climate, it is telling that this new update shows that the last five years record the lowest period of landfalling hurricane intensity of any five-year period dating all the way back to 1900.
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. writes on his blog today:
The figure above comes courtesy Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Center. It shows the annual intensity of US landfalling hurricanes from 1900 to 2012. The figure updates a graph first published in Nature in 2005 ( Figure 2 here in PDF, details described there).
…
The data shown above includes both hurricanes and post-tropical cyclones which made landfall at hurricane strength (i.e., storms like Sandy). In addition to Sandy, there have been 3 other such storms to make landfall, in 1904, 1924 and 1925. The addition of the storms does not make a significant impact on the graph.
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Here’s another opportunity for the caterwaulers like alarming Al Gore, weepy Bill McKibben, joltin Joe Romm, and kid blogger Chris Mooney to learn from actual data and history and stop trying to turn Sandy into a poster child for climate .
Unfortunately, based on their past history, I’m betting they’ll pull a Sgt. Shultz and profess “I’ve learned NOTH-ING!”.
Going back to what Pielke wrote in 2005 in his rebuttal to Kerry Emanuel this still holds true, and even more so related to the infrastructure damage seen from Sandy:
Looking to the future, Emanuel1 provides no evidence to alter the conclusion that changes in society will continue to have a much larger effect than changes in climate on the escalating damage resulting from tropical cyclones.
Don’t call Sandy a hurricane. The storm never had sustained wind speeds of hurricane level. Check any of the land stations or the off-shore buoys. Read the NHC forecasts and discussion reports, such as http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2012/al18/al182012.discus.029.shtml?
Sandy weakened just before landfall to speeds well below the hurricane threshold. The media used the NHC forecasts that were wrong, or used weasel words such as “hurricane gusts”
There are no wind data anywhere that Sandy qualified as a hurricane at landfall.
To qualify as a hurrican, you need sustained speeds of 33 meters per second averaged over one minute. I saw no wind speeds for sandy anywhere near that, the most I saw was 28 meters per second at one off-shore buoy, most other speeds were around 25 meters per second at or just offshore of Cape May NJ and outside NY harbor. Speeds off Long Island and Delaware were lower than that.
The National Hurricane Center has somebody called “C.Landsea”? You’re having a laugh!
You’re preaching to the choir here. None of this will come as a suprise to any informed readers, the problem is getting the msm to spread the word to the rest of the world.
There were hurricanes in 1900..?? But I thought the ‘climate’ only started in 1987..!!
Obama in Doha: rise of temperature has accelerated over the past ten years, so has sea levels, bla, bla, bla. This hubris comes from the president of the USA.
The biggest risk for now is skeptics claiming they have won the argument.
So keep those posts comming.
It is not the severity of the storm; it is where the storm affects the land! New York got it by an almost Cat 1. If that storm had occurred in Mexico, it would have been page 14 news.
Like climate verses weather, the size of a storm is now measured by the monetary damage it causes.
Global Warming will need to freeze/torture Europe for two or three years, then the hockey stick will be broken.
It is sad that warmers must sell that a colder world is better. And that deniers must sell that a warmer world is better. This is like the Democrats pushing for tax hikes, and the Republicans fighting against the tax hikes. True proof that the world is now upside down.
To Dr. Lurtz:
Check your circuits, sir. You’re getting wrong answers. Of course, your use of the pejorative term “deniers” shows which side you’re on.
Anybody have any idea what “m/s cubed” is?
@WiRW Anybody have any idea what “m/s cubed” is?
I’m still waiting on that, too.
Energy could be measured in kg m^2/sec^2
To get Power, as in Power Dissipation Index, you divide by time
Power measured in kg m^2/sec^3.
To get m^3/sec^3, that is “m/s cubed”,
You would divide (like normalizing for an index)
Power (kg-m^2/sec^3) [estimated how?] by some unknown quantity measured in kg/m (huh?!?)
Let’s see what Google provides… Wikipedia has mention without definition.
Oh goody! Climate Audit has a DOC…
Cube the one max wind speed every six hours and sum over the year? Really??
Assuming that definition is close to the one use create the chart at top….
Let’s review my initial questions, shall we?
Is size of storm an element in the Power Dissipation Index? Nope.
How does a very large 80+ mph wind field compare to a much smaller 80+ wind field with a tight 120 mph core? the big storm gets a much smaller index value.
Is location a factor? Maybe. The “US” part of the title might mean is is from measurements over the US. But it might mean ‘US NOAA data”
Is this a measure of dissipation on to US land? Not sure.
Is it a max point at landfall or integrated over the history over land? Whole history at least tropical storm strength, over land and water(?).
Is Rain fall Included? Nope.
Is Storm Surge included? and if so, is it normalized for tides? Nope.
So my elevator speach is, ” ‘The US Hurricane Power Dissipation Index’ is a numerical quantity that has little link with real world physics.” According to the index, area and volume matter not. Nor does rain and water. An upward or downward trend over time means little interms of climate. Four days of a 60 mph Sandy = 1/2 day of a 120 mph compact storm. I think there are some important things missing from this index.
Who is Richard Windsor? says:
November 28, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Anybody have any idea what “m/s cubed” is?
Without knowing the context, this is my answer. Since m/s is speed, and m/s/s is change in speed or acceleration, then m/s/s/s would be change in acceleration. This would happen for example when an object is far out in space and it falls to earth. The acceleration would increase the closer it got to Earth. Another example would be when there are two point charges and one is fixed. The one that can move would experience changes in force, hence changes in acceleration.
Having just seen the comment by Stephen Rasey, did you mean (m/s)^3? If so, it does come up in a physics text that I proofread for a publisher. The formula for the output power of a wind turbine is P = 0.556 kg/m^3(r^2)(v^3). So with r in m and v in m/s, the P comes out in W. Does this help?
The first derivative of acceleration is called jerk.
To Werner Brozek:
Your formula holds the essence of the answer. The comment on Emanuel’s paper by Landsea gives the source of the PDI as wind velocity cubed. This has dimensions of power x length / (unit mass). Thus the PDI, multiplied by the density of the air, gives power exerted per unit area. As Stephen Rasey points out, it may not be the best measure.
To Stephen Rasey:
Clearly you are not impressed with PDI as a measure. May I point out that this “figure of merit” was used by Dr. Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a strong proponent of AGW, in an effort to make his case that AGW is causing stronger hurricanes? Roger Pielke Jr. is simply quoting from an effort made by Dr. Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center to show that Emanuel’s proposed correction to the PDI (see original paper in Nature) over-corrected and caused older hurricanes to be falsely shown as weaker.
@Wernerdid you mean (m/s)^3? I think the author meant that with “m/s cubed”. And it is consistent with the blockquote description: “max wind speed cubed”
output power of a wind turbine is P = 0.556 kg/m^3(r^2)(v^3).
So power out of a turbine is proportional to velocity cubed. Interesting.
Take away the wind turbine (divide by the area of the turbine), and you will get something proportional to (Power / cross-sectional unit area), and it is turning into a “Power flux” attempting to be represented by the outlier, max 1-minute sustained winds at the one most concentrated observed point in the flux. I harken back to “Div, Grad, Curl, and all that!”
I don’t think anything calling itself Power * Index and not integrating over the cross-sectional area of the storm is a useful measure. We also have to integrate that flux area around the circumference of the storm… after all, we can horizontally stack turbines in a wind field. If we do that, we do indeed get the missing m in the numerator. But that means we need to know the radius of all storms are of equal size. If we let radius of the storm be a function of max velocity, the dimensional algebra falls apart again. Either way — Fail!
@chris R. — Thanks for the backstory. Well it’s good to know that I arrived at my conclusion from first principles rather than reputation.
why is mine not posting?
[Reply: Per site Policy, no discussion of HAARP. Also, please post using only one screen name. We can tell, you know. — mod.]
[snip – HAARP is a banned topic on this blog – mod]
[snip – HAARP is a banned topic on this blog – mod]
The great global warming swindle – Full version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?