Hurricanes/Typhoons - Frequency?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Oct 13, 2013
Posts
14,589
Hurricanes/Typhoons - is the frequency rising?

Some say yes. Some like Hollywood has been vocal about it
It is true that H/T are affecting more people than ever before, this is on the surface at least due to increasing global population and much of that population and associated infrastructure are located in coastal areas

Others say frequency is at least not increasing but statistically reducing
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0184.1?download=true
137554B9-00FB-42E1-966E-29299C86CA4B.png
 
Last edited:
Another reason for the perception of increased occurrence is the now saturation global reporting and 24/7 news. Any event anywhere around the world is thrust into the face of anyone with a TV or internet. I remember a few years ago when a hurricane ventured a bit further north than usual (ie effects reached New York). My God, you'd think the world was ending.

These storms are somewhat like earthquakes - sometimes they occur in 'swarms' but there is no reason for this to happen - just the way it is, and always has been. But great for filling media void with carp.
 
Don’t know about frequency, but am feeling like a magnet for them at the moment. Sitting in the remnants of Florence, flying out of CLT tomoroiw, and NRT and HKG are also on the itinerary.

Hope those two are clear before we get there.

(PS being inland, Florence is a boring non event, just as long as they stop cancelling flights)
 
frequency is one thing ... what about severity? is severity changing (more cat5 events, longer etc.)
 
The Frequent Flyer Concierge team takes the hard work out of finding reward seat availability. Using their expert knowledge and specialised tools, they'll help you book a great trip that maximises the value for your points.

AFF Supporters can remove this and all advertisements

Have been unable to find collated records of the HTC category at landfall...(yet?). so dont know how the layperson can say one way or another whether the severity is changing over time. Some are adamant that its increasing but where is the evidence?

Short duration hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones less than 2 days have increased but the apparently the "bigger" longer duration storms have reduced in frequency. The increase in short duration HTC have been attibuted more to more accurate observation/reporting??

Historical Atlantic Hurricane and Tropical Storm Records – Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
 
Last edited:
frequency is one thing ... what about severity? is severity changing (more cat5 events, longer etc.)
No.The USA has recently gone through the longest period between landfall of a Category 3 or above hurricane in recorded history.
This is the American Meteorology searvice data.On page 4 you will see both frequency and strength are trending down since 1900.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0184.1
Yet CNN-the only English channel we can watch was going on how Hurricane Florence was evidence of climate change-it was a category 2 hurricane at landfall and soon dropped in category after landfall.

Same goes for US fires despite the hype we hear with news reports from California.Acreage burnt has been falling for a century.
44008299924_3f97464295.jpg
 
The wet grass reason doesn't wash. He could easily have stood on the road

The guys behind him ended up on the grass. The cameraman wasn't knocking his camera over, the weatherman's gyrations don't seem to match the grass...

Overly Dramatic Weather Reporter award.
 
And that reporter is more evidence of the hyper-saturated, hyper-exaggerated media coverage that we get now. The actual data points to a slight trend to less frequent and less severe cyclones/hurricanes.
 
Same goes for US fires despite the hype we hear with news reports from California.Acreage burnt has been falling for a century.
44008299924_3f97464295.jpg
Looking at that graph, they’ve been getting worse in the living memory of anyone under 60 ... but the graph doesn’t really mean a lot, in any particular way, given the embiggenment of ability to actually do something about it.
 
Looking at that graph, they’ve been getting worse in the living memory of anyone under 60 ... but the graph doesn’t really mean a lot, in any particular way, given the embiggenment of ability to actually do something about it.
I knew someone would take the bait.
In the 60s and 70s I was very active in the Conservation movement in NSW.In the 60s there was a debate about hazard reduction burns in National Parks.In the end the majority of Conservationists ended up supporting that idea.
In Western Australia they had terrible bushfires around Dwellingup in 1961.After those fires there was a Royal Commission and the major recomendation was controlled burning.That was followed to the letter for ~ 30 years.
Then in the nineties and this century saw the rise of the Greenie and they have campaigned against hazard reduction burns quite successfully.In Western Australia that saw massive fires early in 2016 resulting in 2 lives lost.
The same scenario has occurred in the USA though there egged on by local politicians forcing expenditure away from fire prevention to fire suppression.
The stupidity of the Greens is that hazard reduction burns actually decreases production of green house gases.In fact in the Northern Territory they have established regular burns in Western Arnhem Land to offset the emissions of an LNG plant in Darwin.
 
No.The USA has recently gone through the longest period between landfall of a Category 3 or above hurricane in recorded history.
This is the American Meteorology searvice data.On page 4 you will see both frequency and strength are trending down since 1900.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0184.1
Yet CNN-the only English channel we can watch was going on how Hurricane Florence was evidence of climate change-it was a category 2 hurricane at landfall and soon dropped in category after landfall.

Same goes for US fires despite the hype we hear with news reports from California.Acreage burnt has been falling for a century.
44008299924_3f97464295.jpg

Were those data normalised for the area of land in CA that was forest? I suspect not - but that's not to deride your point. It's just that if not, the high peaks in the early part of the 20th century are likely to be exaggerated if forest clearing was rampant in the 1930s and 1940s. That could then have the effect of implying that the latest situation is historically trivial when it may not be as a proportion of land that is forest.

I'd like to see it expressed as a % of the contemporaneous forest area, not gross acreage.

The question that arises in my mind is what accounted for the essentially steady steep linear decline from about 1930-1950?
 
Were those data normalised for the area of land in CA that was forest? I suspect not - but that's not to deride your point. It's just that if not, the high peaks in the early part of the 20th century are likely to be exaggerated if forest clearing was rampant in the 1930s and 1940s. That could then have the effect of implying that the latest situation is historically trivial when it may not be as a proportion of land that is forest.

I'd like to see it expressed as a % of the contemporaneous forest area, not gross acreage.

The question that arises in my mind is what accounted for the essentially steady steep linear decline from about 1930-1950?
A very good question JohnM.The answer surprised me.
In 1907 forested area in the USA was 307 million hectares.In 1997 302 million hectares so the decrease in forested areas is not the cause of decreased acreage burnt.
https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2000/ForestFactsMetric.pdf
But by 2012 that had increased to just short of 310 million hectares. 766 million acres in this report.
https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf
 
There's an interesting back story to the whole thing that I did a little homework on. It bears less on the forest area than on the fire-fighting regime in the early 20th century and the type of forest that that evolved as an unintended consequence of that.

I could bore you with stuffy original literature but I won't.

In summary, after massive wildfires in the W US in the early part of the 20th C, a very aggressive fire suppression program was instituted from the early 1930s. Many fire lookout towers were built and the 'smoke-jumper' firefighters were deployed to attack fires quickly near their ignition point (mostly lighting-initiated). 'Catch 'em quick and get 'em out' type-stuff. ( I hate to think what the reaction would be if we wanted firefighters to parachute into bushfires today...:eek:).

That morphed into the iconic 'Smokey Bear' fire-prevention advertising campaign that (mistakenly) implied that human activities were the cause of most W US (ie. regions with a marked dry season) 'intense' forest fires (it was in fact lightning by a factor of about 10-20:1). But that became an article of faith. Fires were rapidly pounced upon and extinguished.

Hence the rapid decline in the area burned c. 1930-1950 to an essentially 'minimum state'.

Meanwhile, the forests that had evolved to 'climax' maturity as large-bole trees under periodic intensely hot burns over a very long time now started to become dense thickets of far less mature trees (selective logging also probably had had an influence on that). Effectively a whole new biome of 'pre-climax' vegetation developed as the perceived 'norm'.

We have seen something very similar in SW WA forests with the burning/logging/insect outbreaks over the 20th century.

What evolved was a new fire susceptibility and expression regime.

So, the bottom line is that we are not comparing like-with-like forest-cough-fire ecosystems over the 20th century - irrespective of any spatial changes in forest extent or not.

In other words, in the context of how this discussion started, the old forest burn information (ie. pre mid-1950s on the bar plot) has no comparative relevance to the current situation - or, by extension, contextual relevance to any implied or invoked 'climate change' arguments - because the forest structure, fire-behaviour and fire-fighting regime is vastly different between two quite distinct eras.

Aaahhh - the delights of trying to get long-term data that are relevant, useful - and, err, dare I say,... analysable... Just look'n unfortunately ain't analysis...;):(:mad:.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Enhance your AFF viewing experience!!

From just $6 we'll remove all advertisements so that you can enjoy a cleaner and uninterupted viewing experience.

And you'll be supporting us so that we can continue to provide this valuable resource :)


Sample AFF with no advertisements? More..
Back
Top