From NASA Goddard, video follows. It seems that when you don’t delve into the meteorological factors, “luck” seems to be the only explanation. In discussing this paper with hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue he tells me:
No Major U.S. Hurricane Landfalls in Nine Years: Luck?
The National Hurricane Center calls any Category 3 or more intense hurricane a “major” storm. The last major storm to make landfall in the U.S. was Hurricane Wilma on Oct. 16, 2005 – the fourth major storm landfall of that year, which was the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record. Of course, storms smaller than a Category 3 have made landfall with destructive results, such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Hall and colleague Kelly Hereid, who works for ACE Tempest Re, a reinsurance firm based in Connecticut, ran a statistical hurricane model based on a record of Atlantic tropical cyclones from 1950 to 2012 and sea surface temperature data. While hurricane records stretch back to 1850, the data becomes less complete prior to 1950, Hall said. The study was published recently in Geophysical Research Letters.
The researchers ran 1,000 computer simulations of the period from 1950-2012 – in effect simulating 63,000 separate Atlantic hurricane seasons. They found that a nine-year period without a major landfall is likely to occur once every 177 years on average.
While the study did not delve into the meteorological causes behind this lack of major hurricane landfalls, Hall said it appears it is a result of luck.
“The last nine hurricane seasons were not weak – storms just didn’t hit the U.S.,” Hall said. “It seems to be an accident of geography, random good luck.”
When 2014 passed without a major hurricane landfall, the period from 2006-2014 surpassed the previous record for an absence of known major hurricane landfalls in the U.S., which occurred from 1861 to 1868. The researchers became curious about the probability of nine years passing without a major landfall.
The nine-year period stands out, too, because it immediately followed the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record. As major hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma all hit the U.S., debate intensified about how global warming might drive hurricane activity.
Hall said the past nine years show why there are still questions about the connection between hurricanes and the warming of Earth’s atmosphere and ocean.
“Hurricanes respond in complicated ways to their environment,” Hall said. Regarding the larger climate change-hurricane question, he said, “It’s one of the areas of climate change research where reasonable people can still disagree.”
A trickier problem than simply deriving the odds of such a “landfall drought” is trying to predict when the drought might end. Even though a long period of time has passed, the probability that any given year will end the drought is still the same every year, Hall said.
Think of it this way: If you flip a coin and it comes up heads nine times in a row, there is still a 50-50 chance that the 10th flip will come up tails. Hall and Hereid’s statistical analysis found that in any given year there is a 39 percent probability of one or more major hurricane landfalls on the U.S and that that probability does not depend on the drought length. So what are the chances of this historic period coming to an end in 2015, based solely on the odds of the historical record? Thirty-nine percent, Hall said.
“Each year is roughly independent of the year before,” Hall said. “There are known signals, and natural cycles, and possibly human-induced influences. But for the most part, they are independent, especially for the rare intense landfalls.”
The current “drought” has no predictive value, and neither would one or two big landfalling hurricanes this season.
Nor can any of this be attributable to human activity. Which of course won’t stop the alarmists.
When I used NOAA data and did my own arithmetic, I get and average of 8 to 9 hurricanes in the Atlantic basin since the 1850’s, when record keeping began. This is far too short an interval for determining trends, so any prediction of hurricane frequency in the coming year is trivial. Geologically speaking, and we do have good data on this, the frequency of major storms hitting the Gulf Coast has diminished over the past 5,000 years or so. That is probably significant.
Yes, this is probably a disappointment to NOAA and particularly to the Weather Channel munchkins.
Fortunately for NOAA, “climate disruption” hit Colorado 5/19/2012. 14 inches of snow was reported.
The media, for now, will simply have to be satisfied with record cold and snow events until the next category 3 hurricane makes landfall.
The past should be an indicator of the future, under the same conditions; The “Pause” is still ongoing.
http://www.oarval.org/global_running_ace-30Apr2015OptAV.gif
From Global Tropical Cyclone Activity – Dr. Ryan N. Maue (weatherbell.com), at http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php
The past two => three years have been notable for the low level of the global ACE. http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_energy.asp?basin=gl Perhaps a statistical abnormality, but the data appears to reject the null hypothesis that storm intensity is increasing at the moment on a global basis with a fairly high p value. Hurricanes hitting the east coast of the US are a function of many things. Total cyclone energy all over the globe is less so.
I did not give an exact p value since it depends on how you construct the experiment. Perhaps the best would be a non-parametric statistic on the current run of low intensity after the previous 40 years of data.
Hall said, “It’s one of the areas of climate change research where reasonable people can still disagree.”
Translation, “This is an area where the data don’t fit our narrative so we have to leave ourselves some wiggle room or we will look foolish.”
I heard Michael Mann use the same dodge when Chris Landsea cornered him on the hurricane record at a recent talk at FIU. It was his way of getting out of debating a losing position.
‘Settled Science’ – anything that lets the liberals run off with more loot.
Gotta love how they explain their predictions by using the analogy of flipping coins.
Many of us are getting old and wonder if we will ever see the justice needed to address the biggest scam in human history.
The problem is the mendacious climate change tactics are now being used with every policy making endeavor.
Lying is the most used tool in the tool box leaving every major challenge impossible to resolve.
Think about it.
There is not a single arena where honesty produces sound remedies.
Humans nature has been infected with a deceit pandemic.
I hope to be alive when my kids say “dad you were so right about that global warming crap they were trying to push on us way back in the 2010s.” But unless medical science increases a lot I kind of doubt it. Obama thinks it is more important to worry about something that might happen in 100 years than to do something about ISIS now. It will take a lot of doing to get these guys to change their minds, or to even have minds.
trying to predict when the drought might end….
You would think being able to predict the “pause” would come first.
They just said there’s no predictive skills at all…..it’s all a flip of the coin
The USA-centric nature of this collective “sneer-at-warmists” is grotesque. In the Pacific (both East and West) hurricane levels are at record highs. Maybe what happens in the Philippines, Micronesia, Tuvalu and elsewhere can be dismissed at Anthony’s place – as Neville Chamberlain once said: “far away countries of which we know nothing”.
Hint; read the article first, then comment. Nobody is “dismissing” anything. BTW, Warmists certainly deserve all the sneers and derision they get.
2nd hint: read the title
Third hint – see the Global ACE graph just upthread ^^. Nothing is at ‘record levels’.
Bill,
It is easy, and USEFUL to “sneer-at-warmists.” Just as it is easy and useful to sneer at carnival barkers, snake-oil salesmen, and purveyors of confidence scams that in general are aimed to separate naive people from their money by fraudulent means.
Any thoughtful analysis of the ACE data and SST data by basin or region, along with the understanding that one or two years worth of weather events means nothing for climate, should leave the realization that short term increases and decreases in ACE should occur. But conmen operate on irrational fears and emotions of others. As you so well demonstrate.
Could you share the where you’re getting that? Weather Underground doesn’t seem to support that trend though there’s some missing data there.
He is correct in that the current YTD ACE for WestPac is a record high.
weatherbell.com’s Dr Maue writes:
“May 17, 2015 : Total ACE for Western Pacific has already exceeded 100, most on record since 1970 (most reliable data). The previous records thru May 31 were 1976 (ACE = 94.7) and 2004 (ACE = 80). ”
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php
But for 2014, West Pac was at 90% of historical ACE.
Sandy was not a hurricane when it made landfall. It was a subtropical storm sandwiched between two other storms, a low to the west and a high to the northeast.
Calling Sandy a hurricane at landfall is the typical misinformation of the AGW crowd!
not to mention the timing and exquisite aim, and the fact that over 80% of the property damage was in areas that no sane person would ever build on.
Mother Nature is trying to tell them something. But some folks can be stubbornly stupid!
Of course they’re praying for a hurricane. They would rather people suffer billions of dollars of storm damage as well as loss of life than admit the mistake they made by overhyping this global warming nonsense.
Just wait until the next one hits. The warmunists will be hollering “See! We told you!”, and the record hurricane drought will be a distant memory.
Just like the guys who run Colorado University’s sea level page who complained about a “Pot hole on the road to higher seas” a few years back, these guys also want disaster to strike. It can’t be denied.
Better get HAARP fired up again. http://www.wired.com/2013/05/haarp-fraud/
If they are praying at NASA then presumably they’re using their iPhone compass app to show them which way Mecca is.
Global warming no longer settled science, now just luck and prayer
The chance of a Category 3+ hurricane landfall on the US *on any given day* is negligible as a percentage. That qualifies the event as a “statistically rare event” and therefore the application of Poisson statistics – so-called ‘log-normal distribution’ – is more appropriate than the usual Gaussian statistics – ‘normal’ distribution – that most non-statisticians are familiar with.
Rather than ‘days between events’, the logarithm of the number of days between events should be used.
“Nothing is more terrifying than ignorance in action.” – J.W. von Goethe
Martin Luther King Jr
Disclaimer: I have no formal education in anything related to climate or weather, however…
In the period in question the Upper Midwest has had a string of cool summers, (with the exception of 1 or 2). The northern jet has influenced temps here to a substantial degree. I also know that the jet streams can influence the path of storms, even taking the tops off of them to the point that they shrivel and die. With the Northern Jet frequently impacting activity in the Central Atlantic
Anyone: Is it just a coincidence that the Northern Jet has behaved like it has, and there were no major landfalls? Or am I still drunk from the rather exceptional batch of 2002 and 2003 clarets we consumed last night? And, if I can figure this out shouldn’t we just fire all people who claim to have expertise in the area, and start over from scratch?
Does Dr. Ryan Maue’s rule apply to global warming as well? The main period of warming lasted less than 30 years, yet alarmists were quick to extrapolate additional warming that has not occurred. I wish they would follow their own rules.
They do. When it’s convenient for them.
The Rule says a sample of length X is not sufficient to extrapolate a period of length X. It says nothing about extrapolating a period of length X/30.
Ayres (1969, p. 100) suggested a rule of thumb that the extrapolation forward (by h periods) should not exceed the time span of the historical data.
“Of course, storms smaller than a Category 3 have made landfall with destructive results, such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012”
Of course. Hooplacane Sandy. Who could dare be reminded that it was a tropical storm at landfall, and that it was made rather turgid by its adsorption into a good old Nor’easter. Just thought I’d slip that in there.
Nor’easters are very dangerous, very violent and I lived through several during the 1970’s in Coney Island, NY.
And these huge Nor’easters are…indications of global cooling! Sandy was a classic global cooling storm.
Sandy was transitioning to a post-tropical storm at landfall, and that caused more confusion than it should have, some of the procedural stuff has been fixed, like the NHC will keep producing reports on storms like that instead of passing it on to the local NWS offices.
More on dangerous nor’easters: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/06/50-years-ago-the-great-atlantic-storm-of-1962/
Yes, the current 9-year strike is luck. And no, the 3-4 major hurricanes in 2005 were not CO2 caused, they were also luck (bad one in that case).
What the 9-year strike DOES tell us is that there is no way that CO2 could be the cause of an INCREASE in hurricane activity on the coasts of the US. Because we have more CO2 than ever, and less hurricanes than ever. This happening when CO2 favours less hurricanes, requires a bit of luck. This happening when CO2 is unrelated to hurricanes, requires moderate luck. And this happening in a context of increased risk of hurricanes due to CO2, would not be just luck, but rather a 1-in-a-million chance. My bets are on either no relationship, or perhaps a positive one (less US coast hitting major hurricanes with more CO2).
When you look at statistics, shouldn’t you remove known factors, e.g., impacts of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and ENSO. Look at periods when AMO peaked and started decreasing with ENSO signals…that may help compare fuji apples with gala apples. I know, then there’s only N=2 or 3, which isn’t statistically sound. Who’s going to admit that?
AMO and ENSO are very,very short-term oscillations. Way too short-term to use for climate predictions. Look for 1000 to 10000 year cycles. This is Geology, folks, so you have to think on the larger scale.
“Hall and Hereid’s statistical analysis found that in any given year there is a 39 percent probability of one or more major hurricane landfalls on the U.S…”
If that is true, then the probability of no major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. for 9 years is 0.61^9 or about 0.0117. That’s only slightly better than one chance in a hundred. The odds are that something more than just luck is at play here.
On many occasions Bob Tisdale has shown the cooling effect tropical cyclones have on sea surface temperatures by showing a track of “cooler” surface waters along the path of the cyclone.
Question:-
Could a reduction in Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) mean more energy retained in the sea surface possibly resulting in an increase in sea surface temperatures?
That line of reasoning sounds like it has merit. These last 2 typhoons in the western Pacific clearly pulled a lot of heat out of the sst. The western portion of ENSO region 4 gave up a lot of heat over the last 17 days. Winds in the Pacific are still shifting as Typhoon Dolphin drags a portion of the easterly stream moving through 10N to 20N, northwest and offshore of Japan. In it,s early days it dragged that same easterly flow and pushed it south across the equator for around 10 days. Between the 12th and the 17th of this month the western ocean sst,s dropped around 1.5C average temps as TS 7 became Typhoon Dolphin. TS 7 started on the 5th, but there was a small rotation sitting there for a week prior to that.
A link to view the last stage of Typhoon Dolphin…http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=191.47,28.93,671