Home/BlogAs Hyper-Hurricane Patricia approaches the western coast of Mexico with 190 mph sustained winds, satellite imagery shows what is usually only seen in typically-stronger West Pacific typhoons — a very constricted eye (in the center of the imagery), roughly akin to an extremely large tornado (but different physics, I know):
MODIS color imagery of Hurricane Patricia with 190 mph maximum sustained surface winds.
Eastern Pacific hurricanes are typically not flown into with “hurricane hunter” aircraft, so it’s questionable whether this one really is a “record setter”…they flew into this one because it looked like it would be unusually strong. The intensity of these systems is usually estimated based upon appearance in satellite visible and infrared imagery, which is prone to error.
This one is the strongest “hurricane” (Atlantic or East Pacific nomenclature) they have happened to fly into. It’s doubtful that a stronger one hasn’t occurred in, say, the last 50 years which wasn’t flown into with aircraft.
I wonder what they really dropped in there.
Since this is shaping up to be a strong el Nino year, do you think it could be connected to el Nino? Especially since it appeared in the east Pacific?
I’d like to see data on the east Pacific hurricanes of the last strong el Nino of 1996.
Bob Clark
Assuming you meant to say 1997 (there was no strong El Nino in 1996):
The Eastern Pacific Basin saw 19 storms, 9 of Hurricane strength, and 7 major hurricanes. it had an ACE of 160*10^4 kt^2. This was an above average year for the basin. Generally speaking the behavior of activity in the Eastern Pacific Basin and the Atlantic Basin are the inverse of the other-an active season in one will be an inactive season in the other. This is true both of the ENSO component of variability, and the AMO related component: Eastern Pacific Hurricane seasons since 1995 have tended to be less active just as in the Atlantic they have been more active. The greatest activity since records became relatively reliable was 1992.
Hurricane Linda (1997) comes to mind for comparison. It has held (or at least been competitive with) some of the records for East Pac hurricanes. I don’t recall any aircraft investigating Linda; the estimates were almost entirely from satellite. I haven’t seen a quantitative comparison of satellite-based metrics for Linda vs Patricia yet.
How did hurricane Patricia turn from a category 5 to 2 so suddenly?
Were the oceanic wind speeds correct?
there’s a lot of elevated terrain in western Mexico, and that will quickly destroy a hurricane
Is it possible that this elevated terrain, caused higher winds speed, before the eye got anywhere near this terrain?
The elevated terrain allowed cool dry air to be sucked into the eyewall, according to Joe Bastardi at Weather Bell, who can be quite accurate about these things. The eye fell apart while it was still over water. The winds quickly dissipated after that, but the storm still had a ton of water. Remember this was a relatively compact hurricane. Some of the photos circulating for this storm are fraudulent. They are actually of typhoon Maysak taken in March, 2015.
Joe Bastardi noted that as the storm approached coast, it started pulling in air from above the land. Like dry desert air.
While wind shear blows the tops of tropical cyclones, dry air
entrainment cuts off the storms at the knees.
The stronger the storm, the more it needs everything precisely
right, and dry air entrainment, even over open water, sets a
Cat 5 storm back to cat 2 or 3 very quickly. The storms seem
to have a lot of trouble rebuilding their previous strength.
Also a very tight eyes makes the strongest winds, but the area of those winds is narrow. As soon as the eye enlarges the winds drop off to some degree.
Roy what is the current status of using (airborne) doppler radar for estimating hurricane wind speed?
I don’t think they use it for wind speed. They use:
1) dropsondes
2) flight level winds from aircraft speed extrapolated to the surface
3) the Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer (SFMR) which estimates winds from surface foam and roughness measurements
Airborne Doppler radar is not used for estimating surface wind speed, but it is used for data assimilation in some numerical hurricane models. The models need info on the vertical structure, and radar can tell more about that than about the actual surface wind.
Dr. Spencer,
My understanding of your post was as a balance to the Main Stream Media using this as propaganda for climate change and trying to herd the global public into panic mode to further the agenda of One World Government (only a global government could act on all nations to curb Carbon Dioxide emissions).
Hi Norman,
You stated:
“only a global government could act on all nations to curb Carbon Dioxide emissions”
Exactly correct as many of us have pointed out. You may also consider that the US government has many times provided military hardware to Al Queda and ISIS, you know the people everyone is supposed to fight. Imo, many on the political left conspire to create crisis as pseudo justification for totalitarian and eventually one world governance, even if the supposed crisis is a complete fraud. Truth is frequently the first casualty in war and politics is warfare by other means. Just ask Von Clausewitz.
Have a great day!
They don’t plan it. They do It by accident.
As I see it: Good at heart, but not knowing what they are doing. In getting out of Irak and not acting strictly in Syia, the have given us Millions of refugees heading for Germany. We can help many of them, but it will cost a price.
Being a President or Bundeskanzler like “Mommy” Angela Merkel, they have no time to search for facts as we do, but they depent on the gouvernment apparatus.
Hi Johannes S Herbst,
Treason is not an accident. AlQueda attacked the U.S. and ISIS even if not an off-shoot of AlQueda has pledged to do so as well. There exists no moral, ethical or even rational excuse to provide them and their collection of homicidal rapists and fanatics with any support at all.
Personally, I don’t see evidence that US action in Syria would have been effective at eliminating supposed stockpiles chemical weapons the location of which remained guesswork. In any case, given the record of deception from this and prior administrations ( like the mythical Bosnian genocide aka civil war ) you’d be wiser not to believe much of anything our current administration in the US claims about it.
Have a great day!
Dr. Spencer,
I was listening to a couple of “experts” talk about hurricane Patricia last night on the weather channel. One commentator said ocean temperatures are rising around the planet (surface and at depth) and storm intensity is increasing as a result. I know we are having warmer waters due to El Nino here in California but we just had years of cooler ocean temps for some years. Have you observed ocean temps rising around the globe?
Steve K,
Here is a plot of the global SSTs since 1850: http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadsst3gl/from:1850/mean:12/offset:0.8/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1850/mean:12/normalise/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1910/offset:1.0/trend/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1910/offset:0.55/trend/plot/esrl-amo/trend
Here is a recent SST plot from Bob Tisdale: https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/01-global-ssta.png?w=640&h=418
In other worded, global SSTs are the highest they have been in the past 165 years. No one can deny the basic fact that hurricanes and typhoons get their energy from warm ocean temperatures.
Dennis Hlinka,
You wrote: “No one can deny the basic fact that hurricanes and typhoons get their energy from warm ocean temperatures”.
And no one can deny the basic fact that to convert thermal energy into mechanical energy, such as wind, you need a difference in temperature. Global warming is expected to reduce temperature gradients, both as a function of latitude and altitude. So the effect on storms is far from obvious.
Mike,
The energy of tropical systems does not depend on the temperature difference that mid-latitude storm systems do. I would suggest you do a little research on the differences.
When proposing perpetual motion mechanisms, one should at least include a reference.
Actually, he’s correct, you should do a little research. Tropical cyclones don’t depend on horizontal temperature gradients, but they do depend on vertical ones.
That Tropical cyclones draw energy from the heat of the tropical ocean really doesn’t have the significance that you think it does. Sea Surface Temperatures only determine the maximum potential intensity. The actual intensity depends upon dynamical conditions, and how those change with anthropogenic warming is largely ambiguous, though generally they are thought to go in the opposite direction, against formation of more and more intense Tropical Cyclones.
More importantly than that it is the consensus among Tropical Cyclone researchers that any intensity increase due to global warming should not yet be detectable. Insinuating, as you do here, that it is undeniable that Patricia’s intensity can be attributed to global warming, is in fact at odds with the consensus of the scientific community. In short, you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. Do a little research.
My (limited!) understanding of the Vostok ice core research is that oceans take nearly 1000 years of energy input to warm significantly. Do you think AGW activities over the last 100 years could be significant enough to cause our current warming?
Where I live in California the last previous years we experience cold ocean temps ( I read due to POD, “la Nina”). This caused (so I have read) considerable up welling from Santa Barbara to Mexico. We could see pods of Blue whales nearly everyday. I never experienced this in my lifetime.
Steve K,
“oceans take nearly 1000 years of energy input to warm significantly.”
That is true for the deep ocean.
You might have noticed the terms Transient Climate Response (TCR) and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). The latter is what you will eventually get when the deep ocean warms; that will take a very long time. TCR represents the warming on time scales relevant to people; it is smaller than ECS since some of the greenhouse warming is offset by transfer of heat into the deep ocean.
Both TCR and ECS are defined in terms of the temperature rise that would result from double CO2, with the rate of increase also specified for the former. IPCC gives TCR of 1.0 to 2.5 C and ECS of 1.5 to 4.5 C. Observational studies usually give TCR between 1.0 and 1.5 C and ECS between 1.5 and 2.0 C.
“Where I live in California the last previous years we experience cold ocean temps”
It is upwelling that causes cold surface ocean temperatures. I think that a change in upwelling must be due to a change in surface currents. That might be the same change that has brought such warm water to the ocean off the Pacific Northwest.Yet another example of a change in one thing being accompanied by an opposite change elsewhere.
Thanks
Dennis,are those SST’s pre or post adjustments and other manipulations?
Dr. Spencer,
Try as you may, these are facts about Patricia and the overall hurricane/typhoon season that you cannot ignore [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/10/22/extremely-dangerous-category-4-hurricane-patricia-to-slam-west-coast-of-mexico-friday/]:
1) Patricia made history Friday morning when its peak winds hit 200 mph. “This makes Patricia the strongest hurricane on record in the National Hurricane Center’s area of responsibility (AOR) which includes the Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific basins,” NHC said early Friday morning. “The minimum central pressure estimated from the aircraft data, 880 mb [down to 879 mb at 2 p.m. Friday], is the lowest ever for our AOR.”
2) Patricia experienced a historic rate of intensification between Wednesday night and early Friday morning when its peak winds increased by 140 mph. It morphed from a loosely organized conglomeration of thunderstorms to the planet’s strongest and most wicked class of storm.
3) “Patricia is estimated to have intensified 85 kt [100 mph] in the past 24 hours,” the National Hurricane Center said in its 11 p.m. update Thursday. “This is a remarkable feat, with only Linda of 1997 intensifying at this rate in the satellite era.”
4) Fueled by one of the strongest El Nino events since 1950 [http://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/nino34.png], Patricia has become the 9th hurricane in the eastern Pacific to achieve at least category 4 or 5 intensity, which is the most on record.
5) It is the 22nd category 4 or 5 storm to form in the Northern Hemisphere this year, which is also the greatest number ever recorded.
My understanding that the rapid intensification of Patricia was more due to lack of wind shear than to SST’s. There is a relative drought in Atlantic hurricanes this year despite relatively high SST’s because of increased shear associated with El Nino conditions.
As for your pint #1, the 879 mb was the lowest pressure recorded in the NHC AOR.
1. Operational intensity estimates are highly provisional. There’s a non trivial probability Patricia will not retain it’s record in the final Best Track data.
2. Precisely measuring the rate of intensification is something we are much better able to do now than we were in the past. “Historic” in this statement refers, in reality, to a very short history indeed. Additionally, there is no obvious connection between the rate of intensification and global warming and a single record does not make a trend. There is not even theoretical support that I am aware of for warming influencing the rate of intensification for individual storms.
3. This isn’t a different point, you’re just padding your “facts” to make it a larger number. See 2.
4. Yes, this season has been active due to El Nino. Whether and how global warming influences ENSO is a point on which no current scientific consensus exists. In terms of years, this one is most like 1992. Some time next year we’ll have a pretty good idea how this year compares overall, but so far whether it’s broken records is largely provisional.
5. You have absolutely no idea how uncertain the intensity records for some of these basins are prior to the last couple of decades or so, do you? There’s no indication of any trend in the number of 4&5 cyclones which can’t be attributed to changes in our ability to measure these storms. One year does not change that.
Again, do a little research instead of just quoting factoids. You are well out of step with mainstream science on this subject.
well, I can ignore true believers’ desperate attempts to turn every weather event into some new boundary
with the obvious purpose of misleading a gullible public who don’t pay attention to the details behind the hyperbolic headlines
find a new fake religion
Since we have accurate records of hurricanes and cyclones dating back to 2500 BC or so, I suggest we have enough records to see trends and to make statements including words such as historic and record setting.
The point being when you have no records everything sets a record. When you have few records, they are regularly set. Etc. So, I suspect Patrician, while devastating to those who live there, is nothing new to the local land mass.
The same will be true when the next major earthquake hits off the coast of Oregon – the Cascadia Fault – but since we don’t have records of it, even though the last major one was in 1700, it will be a record for those who keep such records. I suppose they’ll find a way to blame mankind.
For the earth, another day, another earthquake.
My former advisor wrote a paper looking at Oxygen isotopes in tree ring alpha cellulose, which pick up the fractionated water from a major huricane. The record went back hundreds of years and showed a relatively calm phase in the past 50 years. Basically, we just dont have the data to say this storm was special.
http://m.pnas.org/content/103/39/14294.full
The category of a hurricane is determined by a wind speed. A total energy might provide a better estimate of a potential for damage. Can we measure a total energy of a storm?
What you’re looking for is the Integrated Kinetic Energy or IKE. We can measure that, at least theoretically. I don’t think there are good records of it, though, especially going back in time.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/ike/
Not just the IKE. Also the heat contents of the air and water, including a latent heat of all that water vapor.
It’s not the energy of the water that’s damaging, it’s the volume. It’s the kinetic energy of the winds that’s damaging, not fact that the rain is warm.
“Total Energy” of the storm would not be more reliable indicator of damage potential than the kinetic energy alone.
Energy is a flexible notion. A latent heat warms the air, creates rising currents – a mechanical energy. Speaking of a mechanical energy, a gravitational energy of those 50 cm of rain falling from – how high? 5 km maybe, I am not a hurricane guy – should also be taking into account.
This was all hype thankfully so. The 1959 storm did far more damage and was obviously more powerful. That this one was downgraded so rapidly also tells us it was never as powerful as they alleged, terrain or not. They played this one like a fiddle in preparation for Paris. As they did with the lie about the record flooding in South Carolina, and the warmest year ever.
I have heard that powerful hurricanes generate tornados, was Patricia unable to make a tornado, but almost did?
Whether a hurricane generates tornadoes depends upon the right conditions occurring, it’s not necessarily a matter of the intensity of the storm itself-at least, a strong storm is not a guarantee of large numbers of tornadoes being spawned-there’s some association with intensity but a lot of variability. According to this page:
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/cphc/pages/FAQ/Hurricanes_vs_tornadoes.php
“Almost all tropical cyclones making landfall in the United States spawn at least one tornado, provided enough of the tropical cyclones circulation moves over land. This implies that Gulf coast landfalling tropical cyclones are more likely to produce tornadoes than Atlantic coast tropical cyclones that sideswipe the coastline. The rate at which tropical cyclones produce waterspouts over the ocean is unknown, although Doppler radars have identified many cases where storm cell rotation suggestive of the presence of tornadoes was observed over water”
“It is difficult to predict which tropical cyclones will produce large tornado outbreaks, although there is some indication that the likelihood of a major outbreak increases as TC size and intensity increase.”
— Andrew_FL says:
October 24, 2015 at 3:12 PM
Whether a hurricane generates tornadoes depends upon the right conditions occurring, it’s not necessarily a matter of the intensity of the storm itself-at least, a strong storm is not a guarantee of large numbers of tornadoes being spawned-there’s some association with intensity but a lot of variability. According to this page:
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/cphc/pages/FAQ/Hurricanes_vs_tornadoes.php —
It seems that this storm lacked any tornados- maybe that is related it’s small diameter.
Generally it seems me, that the larger the hurricane and particularly the larger the eye of the Hurricane should result in a more intense storm [or greater wind speed].
The headline is the fact of this storm had highest wind speeds
of a hurricane- But not highest wind speed of a tornado. So the numerous tornadoes spawn by a hurricane may have had greater wind speeds but such tornado events within a hurricane are generally not assigned to the wind speed of a hurricane.
Or the anomaly of such hurricane which suppose to be most intense ever measured seems to be the lack of tornadoes.
Or were this a CAT 2 or 3 hurricane then that it were to lack tornadoes it would be less of anomaly.
And the sudden increase to Cat 5 and sudden decrease to not even being a hurricane level storm seems quite strange.
First I would have suspect some kind of measurement error [or the reporting of facts] and then if not I guess it’s landfall in hilly/mountainous regions and that is was so small, could only be the other factors which could be involved in becoming so intense very quickly and it’s rapid fading into a non-event which wasn’t in any sense severe catastrophic event that was predicted by the weather channel.
There’s not actually any necessary correlation between max windspeed and the size of the storm. Typhoon Tip was by far the largest cyclone we’ve been able to observed and determine these things and it was indeed a very intense cyclone. At the other end of the spectrum there’s Tropical Storm Marco which was much much smaller and much less intense. But the previous record holder for the smallest Tropical Cyclone, Cyclone Tracy, was only slightly bigger and would have qualified as a Category 3 (The Australians use their own scale).
No Tornadoes being observed at all is unusual for a system of almost any intensity. The observing network in Mexico probably just sucks.
Tornadoes do not qualify for being the windspeed assigned to the storm because off how Maximum Sustained Wind is defined. Realistically speaking it would not be an informative statistic to use tornadoes to gauge the intensity, anyway.
Andrew FL and Roy — Thanks for the insights.
Hi Dr. Roy,
NOAA apparently claims it’s been 10 years since a major hurricane has hit the US mainland.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/kathleen-brown/noaa-says-its-record-no-major-hurricane-has-struck-us-mainland-10-years
Have a great day!
JohnKL,
“it’s been 10 years since a major hurricane has hit the US mainland.”
True. But during that time Ike and Sandy managed to do as much damage as some major hurricanes. As noted elsewhere in this discussion, size matters.
Hi Mike M,
Thanks for the reply. You state:
“True. But during that time Ike and Sandy managed to do as much damage as some major hurricanes.”
Sandy occurred pretty far north and the storm little doubt lost some intensity heading toward Jersey and the N.E.. This region does get hit by hurricanes occasionally. My dad lived on Long Island as a child back in the 1930-40’s and witnessed two large ones. Still they usually don’t get the hurricane size and frequency found in southern regions like Louisiana. North East regions usually don’t prepare quite as well as Southern ones for such events, not that either region is perfect.
Ike I don’t recall to much about and will likely read more about it later.
Have a great day!
Size matters, no? How does ACE reflect this type of differential?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Typhoonsizes.jpg
See what I said above about Integrated Kinetic Energy. There are methods of gauging storm intensity that take size into account, but our records of them are not as good as for ACE.
In essence the issue is accurately defining the whole wind field for the storm, especially before satellite imagery to give a reliable indicator of size.
“Different physics” you write, Roy?
About as different as the is the fictitious fiddled physics of climatology from the physics of the real tropospheres of real planets.
The correct physics explains why vortex tubes and other centrifugal forces set up radial temperature gradients, just as does gravity.
Anthony Watts knows this single fact disproves the whole GH conjecture, so he called in Robert Brown to write his pathetic article trying to disprove it – see this page. BigWaveDave knew it when he wrote this comment. Josef Loschmidt knew it in the 19th century, and I have proven why the temperature gradient is indeed the state of maximum entropy – which is what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says will evolve autonomously.
It needs absolutely no rising air, Roy.
The temperature gradient is there to be seen in the 350Km high nominal troposphere of a certain planet that is 30 times further from the Sun than we are, and is yet hotter at the base of its troposphere than is the temperature at the base of ours.
What I say, Roy, is supported by copious evidence and valid physics. And rain forests are not 50 degrees hotter than deserts as the IPCC wants the world to be gullible enough to believe.
Robert Brown does not understand entropy maximization.
You, Roy Spencer, do not understand entropy maximization.
Until you (and most of your readers) understand entropy maximization (by way of a propensity for unbalanced energy potentials to dissipate) then you will not understand what it is that the Second Law “tells” us will eventuate.
You see, Roy and others, entropy is quite a different thing from energy. Entropy can and will increase without there necessarily being any change in total internal energy in an isolated system. It does so in a horizontal plane when uneven temperatures level out. Entropy also increases when water levels in a vertical U-shaped tube level out, in that case there having been an initial difference in gravitational potential energy.
The Second Law is about entropy maximization: it is not about temperatures leveling out, because that only happens in a horizontal plane because the gravitational potential energy component is the same at each end of a horizontal tube.
But turn the tube to a vertical position and then entropy maximization leads to there being both a density gradient and a temperature gradient when the stable state of maximum entropy (thermodynamic equilibrium) is attained.
That’s why you were wrong, Roy, in your “Misunderstood” article where you spoke of isothermal conditions.
That, Roy, is why the mean temperature of Earth’s surface is hotter than the mean temperature of the whole Earth+atmosphere system. That is why all planets get hotter towards their centers, whether there is gas or solid en route.
All the Sun’s direct radiation does is maintain a stable temperature at some altitude where it’s colder than at lower altitudes. On the planet I have often talked about (30 times further from the Sun) the solar radiation maintains a temperature colder than 60K around the top of its troposphere – but that’s all the solar radiation has to do. The rest is done by gravity which, in effect, has trapped solar energy “under” the sloping thermal plane that it maintains.
The evidence is staring you in the face on other planets and here also, because the solar radiation is simply nowhere near strong enough to explain Earth’ mean surface temperatures. Thus the surface temperature has nothing to do with GH gases slowing surface cooling, because the Sun’s radiation can’t get the temperature up to what it is in the first place. What does that is explained for the first time in world literature here on my website that over 12,000 have visited this year. Be the next to visit, Roy, because you have a lot to learn from what I have explained there and in linked videos, papers and a book.
[SMH]
Given monastery records of planting times and growing seasons in Europe and China, and Viking records of farmlands in Greenland and vines in Vinland in the times of Leif the Lucky we have pretty good reason to believe the Earth was warmer in historical times than it is now.
Every American knows, or should know that in 1776 cannon from Ticonderoga were brought across the frozen Hudson to General George Washington in Harlem Heights, saving the Continental Army. The Earth was obviously colder during the Little Ice Age than it is now.
Any climate model must explain those events. Where did the warmth come from to produce the Viking warm (and other warm periods known to history through crop records and such, but leave that; the Viking warm will do)?
Measuring any temperature to a tenth of a degree is difficult. When we were testing space suit ventilation and needed skin temperatures, I used thermocouple soldered to dime-sized copper disks; thermocouples need a reference, so one of the lines in the thermocouple bundle went into a beaker of ice water made from distilled water. That got temperatures reliable to a tenth of a degree, but I couldn’t tell you to the degree what the temperature of the lab was. In fact, I don’t think anyone knows to a tenth of a degree what the average temperature of Los Angeles County is for any given day, week, month, or year. If you want the temperature of the Sea of Cortez to a tenth of a degree we would have to agree on what operations define getting the temperature: how many, in what places — and we could then compare the temperature ten years from now with that today; but we would have to use the same operations both times. Now suppose a new instrument that reliably gets the temperatures we used to get to 1/100th degree; could we then manipulate the ten year old data to give a third decimal place to our accuracy?
Now think what was available to measure ocean temperatures in 1900, and decide what accuracies we had; and contemplate the claims that we are now the hottest temperatures yet, by a few tenths of a degree. And our models cannot start with the 1950 initial conditions and trace the temperatures of Earth from 1950 to 2000.
So where did the Earth get the warming energy, and what did it lose to get us into the Ice Ages?
Jerry,
Firstly we know for certain (directly from the Second Law of Thermodynamics) that so-called greenhouse gases (IR-active) actually lead to cooler surface temperatures, not warmer ones.
It would only take a relatively small variation in cloud cover to explain the variation of one to two degrees between Roman Warming, Dark Ages Cooling, Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age cooling and Current Warming. If variation in cloud cover altered total albedo in the range (30 ± 1)% that would explain it. Conceivably cosmic rays have something to do with cloud formation, and planetary orbits also seem to have a regulating influence, possibly via their magnetic fields which reach to the Sun.
But all the fictitious fiddled physics pertaining to carbon dioxide has nothing to do with climate. I’ve explained why in my comments above and in the linked website, papers, videos and book.
[SMHA]
Doug’s promo tour again….
Best not feed the Trolls…. especially the multiply banned ones.
World record for most hyped non-event in the history of media hysteria?
(Tough call, though. Every strong hurricane, cyclone or tornado is now routinely described as the strongest ever in the history of the world.)
“Every strong hurricane…is now routinely described as…”
Even the ones that don’t happen at all!
We had a real farce, here in England, a year or two ago, when we were promised the storm to beat all storms, with the sea to surge over the coastal defences. In the end…well, it almost ruffled my hair.
Of course, the sheeple completely forget failed predictions. Soon enough, they are again ready for Charles Dicken’s pot-boy, to “freeze their blood” with a monster story.
There was a book published in 1983, “Hype” by Stephen Aronson, which correctly predicted that hype would become a permanent feature of Western “culture.”
dave says: “We had a real farce, here in England, a year or two ago, when we were promised the storm to beat all storms, with the sea to surge over the coastal defences. In the end…well, it almost ruffled my hair.”
If by that you mean the event of 6th Dec 2013 then, no, we were not “promised the storm to beat all storms”, as it was just a fairly average winter Atlantic depression … it was the very high tide that the north winds along the east coast of England surged and squeezed the tidal bulge due the N Sea’s topography.
It was remarkably well forecast actually.
In other words it was never expected to do more than “ruffle your hair” … it was the surge that was the problem. It was nailed. PS: I live on the E coast of England.
see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25253080
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825215000628
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/2013-decwind
“…never expected to do more than ruffle your hair…”
From a cache of press reports from December 5, 2013:
“Forecasters say that 90 mph winds will batter Scotland and northern and eastern England.”
The Daily Express headline for December 6, 2015:
“142 MPH STORM WREAKS HAVOC.”
So, there is the hype, before and after.
The Independent preferred to run the warning (threat) from the Chancellor of the Exchequer that most people will have to work until they drop dead.
Newspaper talk my friend … do learn to differentiate the difference.
Like the Express’s annual “worst winter for 100 yrs forecast”.
Well, no. It’s not a forecast because they aren’t Forecasters (as in responsible ones with the UKMO) – it’s merely speculation on their part to gain publicity to sell newspapers… as are your quotes. A forecast has have a reasonable probability of success. Still one day they may be correct.
In the mean time the REAL Meteorologists get the blame, while people such as you are to ignorant to know the difference.
PS: I am retired from the UKMO.
The issue, as raised by Will, IS “the history of media hysteria.” You are off-topic.
“The issue, as raised by Will, IS “the history of media hysteria.” You are off-topic.”
Not when you make this statement I’m not….
“Of course, the sheeple completely forget failed predictions. Soon enough, they are again ready for Charles Dicken’s pot-boy, to “freeze their blood” with a monster story.”
Predictions are made by experts – in this case Meteorologists at the UKMO, my ex-colleagues, and not by newspapers.
I took it to be a sleight on Forecasters. If it was not then I apologise.
No more failed predictions. Experts now issue PROJECTIONS, which can not be falsified (legally).
The ‘correct’ word, in English, for weather forecasting, is “aeromancy.” It also implies an element of augury.
“I am an aeromancer” seems a better chat-up line than “I work for the Met Office.”
Sorry, but everything about this Patricia story reeks of fraud. Especially the rumour spreading that NOAA and other weather agencies were issued a gag order regarding the official reporting of this storm. That is very disturbing if it turns out to be true.
I have never seen the MSM hype a hurricane story and then so completely drop it within 24 hours. As Ernest Bush pointed out above, some of the photos published were not even from this storm. The Mexican media seemed to have a very different take on the storm than the US. Also, the explanation that it did no damage, because it struck a remote part of the country is nonsense. There are plenty of mid-sized cities in that path, before you get to the mountains, and they would have suffered severe damage from a Cat 5 storm. Let’s not forget how wide Katrina’s path was, and it was not as large as this one.
Bottome line — the Obama years have actually been very quiet for major storms, and this flies in the face of all the predictions that have been made. We are NOT seeing frequency increase of major storms.
Brook,
I am inclined to agree with your view on Patricia.
I will send links to the destruction from both these storms and you can see Patricia was a dud. If NOAA has becomes so corrupt as to fake a storm intensity then the TRUTH is in huge trouble. I hope their scientists have not become this bad at their jobs, but the evidence does make one wonder.
Hurricane Patricia damage link:
https://www.google.com/search?q=damage+from+patricia&noj=1&site=webhp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CB4QsARqFQoTCNzJvYmh6MgCFUZiJgodeX4PzA&biw=1600&bih=783
Trees with leaves and moderate damage to buildings.
Hurricane Andrew:
https://www.google.com/search?q=damage+from+hurricane+andrew&biw=1204&bih=686&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQsARqFQoTCJ-pz9Oh6MgCFUiqHgodEmkK_Q
Considerable damage to buildings and trees are stripped bare.
Really a strange deal in my opinion.