| To read the full article: http://rdcu.be/oiuP From: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~kossin/pubs.html "Here I show, however, that conditions conducive to greater basin-wide Atlantic hurricane activity occur together with conditions for more probable weakening of hurricanes near the United States coast. Thus, the [vertical wind shear] and [sea surface temperatures] form a protective barrier along the United States coast during periods of heightened basin-wide hurricane activity. Conversely, during the most-recent period of basin-wide quiescence, hurricanes (and particularly major hurricanes) near the United States coast, although substantially less frequent, exhibited much greater variability in their rate of intensification, and were much more likely to intensify rapidly." I haven't read it all yet, but I don't quite like that opening. ("Thus, the [vertical wind shear] and [sea surface temperatures] form a protective barrier along the United States coast during periods of heightened basin-wide hurricane activity.") The paper goes back to the late 1940s. I'm not sure if there is enough reliable data over the period and if a conclusion could be made over such a short time frame. Because of the recon data format, I don't have recon data before 1989 on my site. (They either used a different format for recon or they don't have the data available in the NHC recon archive) I don't know how much coverage there was then of hurricanes. There just seems to be a lot based on a single period, 1970-1992, compared to the period before it and the period after it. Is the coverage, satellite and recon based data, good enough to make good enough estimations of intensity of those hurricanes over water over the 1970-1992 period? This seems to deal with intensification too, not whether the storm was already strong and kept that intensity. Some of the articles have some things that seem a little misleading, like this title: "Periods of Greater Atlantic Hurricane Activity Linked to Weaker U.S. Landfalls" https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/periods-greater-atlantic-hurricane-activity-linked-weaker-us-landfalls Were there weaker landfalls of the storms in the quieter Atlantic period or just less storm intensifying before landfall in the U.S. during that time? There were also less storms near the coast in the 1970-1992 period. Some of it gets very technical so I don't know how well they accounted for certain things. |