Summary: In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that the amount of Katrina magnitude hurricanes could soon double because of climate change. Dr Aslak Grinsted says that their analysis indicates that we have passed a global warming threshold. While the relationship between hurricanes and temperatures is disagreed upon by scientists, these scientists combined historic data with projections of climate change, to predict how many Katrina-like storm surges would occur in the future which made their findings more accurate. The results showed that Katrina magnitude hurricanes will become ten times more likely if average global temperatures increase by 2°C. That would mean one Katrina every other year. However, Judith Curry says that the researchers used tide gauge measurements from only six US sites and that their study was based on a data set that incompletely represents US landfalling hurricane activity since 1923.
NOS Themes:
Collaboration is in this article because the study involved scientists from Liverpool, Beijing Normal University, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Lapland and Uppsala University, Sweden.
There is debate and tentativeness in this article because there are people who do not trust the study and feel like not enough data was used.
Conflicts within the scientific community is in this article because there is controversy among scientists about the relationship between hurricanes and temperature.
There is the importance of repeatability because the results of this study need to be able to be repeated to be trusted.
Katherine Gao, Hour 1, Gabel
I compleatly agree that climate change is greatly affecting weather patterns. I found a hurricane archive website that has tracked all hurricanes and storms in different regions of the world from 1851. In the past decade (2001-2011) there were 179 recorded ocean storms. In the previous decade (2000-1991) There were 111 recorded storms. I calculated the number per decade for a few decades back and found a silmilar trend of increasing hurricanes, and death toll.
ReplyDeleteHere is the site:http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/hurrarchive.asp
-Rachel Nelson, Hour 1.
That's really interesting! After reading your post, I found a similar article that argued that it's too early to tell if climate change and hurricanes are linked at all. It did say, however, that the intensity of hurricanes could be expected to increase anywhere from 2-11% in the future. It's scary what a big impact climate change is starting to have on the world around us, especially when you remember the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina.
ReplyDeleteHere's my article:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes
I found another article that supports what you are saying in that global warming will definitely increase hurricanes both in frequency and destruction. They also show the evidence that global warming is indeed happening; the ice caps are gradually melting, the sea level is rising, and precipitation has increased across the globe on average.
ReplyDeletehttp://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/gw-effects/