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 last nine hurricane seasons were not weak – storms just didn’t hit the U.S.,” Hall said.
This is simply misleading. The last TWO Atlantic hurricane seasons have been the weakest back-to-back seasons in over 30 years.
From the last page of http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/2015/apr2015/apr2015.pdf here’s the Atlantic ACE for the past several years:
2010: 165
2011: 126
2012: 133
2013: 36 (The August forecast was calling for 142, an amazing bust for Klotzbach and Gray)
2014: 67
2015: 40 (April forecast, in part due to the expected, and happening, El Nino)
Long term average ACE: 92.
In that case probability of nine years in a row with no major hurricane landfall in the US is 1.17%. In other words there should be at least one such event in that timespan with a probability of 98.83%. But there was not one. Remarkable.
…. and all of the sudden 5 major storms will hit the US and the climate change trumpets will “blow” (sound) again in all their glory
one thing did stand out to me and this appears to happen everywhere:
when you have one aspect that is pronounced, then it’s followed by the opposite fairly near after it happened. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another “dry” year with the el Nino conditions followed by soon or late a record landfall year….
climate is after all en statistic “mean value” of all the weather events you have, including extreme weather and…. the lack of it
i wonder if it will hit the 10 year mark…. just to tease the climate doomsayers….
but i do think that “drought” might end pretty intensely
only looking at last 30-years is too short of time period to extrapolate anything about previous or next 30-years
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that is statistical nonsense. 30 years of data is certainly enough to extrapolate for next month and next year. The cheat in the statement is to imply that because you cannot predict 30 years you cannot predict 1 year.
Also, if you go 30 years without a hurricane you can most certainly say that the odds are that you will go the next 30 years without a hurricane. if you go 30 years and have lots of hurricanes, you can most certainly say the odds are that you will have lots of hurricanes over the next 30 years.
so to say you cannot “extrapolate anything” is bunk.
However, because the 30 years from 1977 to 2006 were warmer than from 1947-76, you can’t extrapolate that 1997-2026 will be warmer still. The period 1917-46 was warmer than 1947-76. “Climate scientists” in 1977 were worried that, extrapolating the cooling of the prior 30 years, the world was headed into another “ice age”.
what you can say is that if the climate changed over the previous 30 year period, it is likely to change over the next 30 year period.
simple linear extrapolation makes no sense because nature is cyclical. linear trends do not and cannot persist for long, as they lead to extermination of some sort.
thus, extrapolation of natural systems begins with understanding the cycle length. unless and until you know the cycle length of the natural system under study, extrapolation is meaningless.
for example, children grow more than a foot for each of the first 2 years of life. Extrapolating, an 80 year old person should be more than 80 feet tall.
“The last nine hurricane seasons were not weak – storms just didn’t hit the U.S.,” Hall said”
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again more nonsense. my accident record hasn’t improved, there were lots of accidents on the road, just no cars hit me.
There were very few hurricanes in the Atlantic and none were strong last summer which was a very cold summer like this summer is turning out to be, too. It is going down to freezing tonight in upstate NY, for example! Mid May, no less!
Our rain drought, tornado drought and Hurricane drought all have the same cause:
WHY WIND FARMS CAUSE DROUGHT
http://wp.me/p4JijN-1RV
Wind farms destroy the pathways in the atmosphere that storms employ to become established:
Storms (all storms) involve the emergence of conduit-like structures (ie. jet streams, tornadoes) that transport energy from high (in the form of low pressure) and lift moist air up, one result of which being rainstorms. Starting from the jet streams that run along the top of the troposphere, these conduits grow downward to initiate storms. But they can only do this if the prerequisite factors underlying their growth are present. There are, basically, two prerequisites: 1) Long smooth distinct boundary layers between dry and moist bodies of air, and 2) Energy.
Here’s the problem. Wind farms introduce turbulence that destroys the smoothness, length, and distinctness of boundary layers between bodies of moist air and bodies of dry air and they remove (harvest) energy.
Are you convinced? No. I don’t expect you to be. Meteorologists have made such a mess of the science that there is little chance anybody can filter out the nonsense. Don’t take my word on it. Instead I suggest you take a look at the maps that show an unusually high degree of correspondence between the location and timing of the drought with construction of wind farms, especially in Texas and California.
“WHY WIND FARMS CAUSE DROUGHT” There may be some truth to this claim, though the explanation they put forward seems a little strangely-worded. Rainclouds are produced by a number of mechanisms but spring showers are typically the consequence of thermals – bubbles of warmed air rising from the surface to an altitiude at which they can no longer hold their moisture due to reduced air pressure and lower temperature. Turbulence can break up and disperse thermals, especially when they are just forming at ground level, and therefore relatively weak.Thus it is quite possible that windturbine downstream turbulence causes a no-rain zone. Exactly how far that would extend would be difficult to say, though. I doubt if it would be more than a few miles.
Oh no, is that more proof that co2 induces droughts?
Turbine wake can also prevent the ground level inversion from forming and keep the air moving next to the ground. Instead of dew forming, the ground dries overnight.
They’re praying to Gaia. No matter who you pray to, you need to be aware the answer may not be what you want.
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.”
Prove it. That is only a hypothesis.
If there are climatological factors that govern the development and life-cycle of hurricanes, then hurricanes ought to autocorrelate with themselves year over year and be correlated with other climatological factors, such as ENSO.
Who was claiming 2005 was just a run of bad luck?
“Scientists have made a breakthrough in man’s desire to control the forces of nature – unveiling plans to weaken hurricanes and steer them off course, to prevent tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1566898/Scientists-a-step-closer-to-steering-hurricanes.html
“The list of United States hurricanes includes all tropical cyclones officially recorded to have produced sustained winds of greater than 74 mph (118 km/h) in the United States.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes
“The US government is using the HAARP Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX) platform to intensify and steer the man made Hurricane Sandy”. http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/obamas-october-surprise-creating-and-steering-hurricane-sandy/
You all aren’t thinking like global warmists. This isn’t causing them a problem at all. If we go more than ten years without a major ‘cane hitting the U.S., when the next one does, they will pull out the word, “unprecedented.”
When we go to the historical record to show they are wrong, lo and behold, all previous hurricanes will have been reclassified as tropical storms. Just normal adjustments for the difference in equipment, ya know. If they can get rid of the MWP and LIA, disappearing storms like Camille would be easy.
“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.”
And that is the story of Katrina, an accident of geography, random bad luck.” Git with it guys at NASA, And I like your old logo better, by the way…
Your present logo looks like something from the 1940’s – before manned space travel …oh wait…
This one is better – more modern and reminds me of the Apollo Programs etc.:
http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NASA.png
Sorry NASA, I do follow all your Mars rovers and all the other NASA adventures in space. Please stick to Space and not Earth…
I’m happy with NASA doing remote sensing operations looking at Earth. I just wish NASA GISS would use more of it.
All the Alarmists need is just one, that is one Cat 5 Hurricane making landfall. The dollar value of this and what it means to Alarmists should not be underestimated. Trenbeth will claim that stored “hidden” heat deep in the oceans (which is caused by Climate Change) provided the fuel for such a storm, and the world can look forward to a Hurricane every week as a consequence. Insurance firms up and down both coasts will significantly raise their homeowner premiums, regulators will be empowered to regulate even more.
We have now entered into the theater of the absurd, where highly educated and credentialed experts are reduced to praying to the Gods for a devastating tropical storm.
So, we have NASA and its allies praying for an active, devastating Atlantic Hurricane season. Lots of corpses and collateral damage. They also are praying for a once in millennia Super Duper El Nino. But, they cannot have both. El Nino conditions produce unfavorable vertical wind shear that inhibit Atlantic tropical storm development. I imagine they would rather take the devastation from tropical storms. Much better drama.
I’m afraid that Sod’s Law, against the influences of El Nino and relatively cool Atlantic west of Africa at 20degN and lack of recent such hurricanes, means that there >will< be a major US land-falling major hurricane this year.
Rich.
In grad school in psychophysics we randomized there | not-there stimulus presentations with a random number algorithm . For example here’s a string of 80 I just generated in my 4th.CoSy :
s" -O" 2 80 _rand at
s" -O--OO---O--O------OOO-OOOOO-OOOO---O-OOOOOOOO-O-O--O--OOOOO----OOO--O-O-O-OO-OO"
Long sequences occur so much more frequently than I intuitively expected that I spent a bunch of time running chi^2s of various sorts on it and it always fitted the theoretical stats quite well , tho you could show graphically that sequential samples fell in hyper-planes .
remember you cant spell the word “environmentalist” without the word “mental”