Hurricanes and Climate Change
Hurricanes and Climate Change is a scholarly work, published in 2008 in ''Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society''. The main subjects of the publication include geology, climatology, environmental science, geography, numerical weather prediction, climate change, tropical cyclone, meteorology, and global warming. National Science Foundation.It was organized to provide a venue for encouraging a lively, spirited exchange of ideas.In this spirit, it was appropriate to convene at the birthplace of the Socratic method.This volume is a collection of research papers from participants of the Summit.Tropical cyclones are typically analyzed as a passive response to climate forcing: the hurricane as a product of its environment.A warm ocean provides sustenance, a calm atmosphere nurturing, and a subtropical high-pressure cell forward direction.An increase in oceanic heat will raise a hurricane's potential intensity, yet an increase in shearing winds could counter by dispersing the heat in a fledgling storm.This perspective is useful for identifying the mechanisms responsible for making some seasons active while others inactive.A point of emphasis at the Summit was that statistical modeling is superior to data analysis (trend lines, etc) as it avoids cherry-picking the evidence and provides a framework for making use of older, less reliable data.For example, a Poisson distribution is useful for modeling tropical storm counts over time.The benefit of a statistical approach is that it provides a context that is consistent with the nature of the underlying physical process, analogous to the way the laws of physics provide a context for studying meteorology.It was shown at the Summit that smoothing (filtering) the hurricane count data introduces low frequency patterns that may not be significant and that a statistical model of Atlantic hurricanes indicates a recent upswing in the number of strongest hurricanes with little or no multidecadal variation.