Jon Hamilton, NPR 12 Aug 09;
The Atlantic Ocean is experiencing the most intense period of hurricane activity in 1,000 years, according to a study in the journal Nature.
The study looked at hurricane activity during the past 1,500 years using techniques that have emerged from a field often called paleotempestology.
The discipline relies on scientists who hunt for physical evidence of ancient storms, says Michael Mann, an author of the study and director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. These researchers often search for evidence of ancient storms by studying lagoons that are separated from the open ocean except when a hurricane causes water to rush over the land barrier, Mann says.
"Typically they send a coring device into the bed of the lagoon," he says. "What one looks for are layers of sediment in that core that tell you that there was an event that was strong enough to take the stuff from the open ocean and bring it all the way across the barrier into that lagoon environment."
Studying these layers is a bit like using tree rings to see what the weather was like hundreds of years ago.
Paleotempestologists also search for evidence of conditions that would have favored hurricanes centuries ago. These include warm ocean temperatures in parts of the Atlantic and the presence of La Nina, an atmospheric phenomenon that creates wind conditions that help storms gain strength.
Coral growth patterns can reveal when the water was warm. Ice cores help identify La Nina years.
Medieval Era Ideal For Hurricanes
When Mann and his team reviewed that sort of evidence, they found that the conditions were ideal for hurricanes in the Middle Ages. "There appears to have been sort of a perfect storm of conditions about a thousand years ago that relate to these various influences," he says.
Perfect conditions don't necessarily produce storms, though. So Mann's team looked at medieval sediments taken from lagoons between Massachusetts and Puerto Rico.
And the sediments confirmed that a number of storms actually had struck the coast during that period.
It was probably a lot like the 2005 season, which was the busiest hurricane season in the Atlantic in recorded history. The season witnessed 28 named storms, including Katrina and Rita.
But the current period of intense hurricane activity differs from the medieval one in an important way, Mann says. Today's storms are associated primarily with warmer ocean temperatures, rather than the influence of La Nina.
"We believe a substantial part of the reason for that anomalous recent warmth is in fact the human influence on climate," Mann says.
There is still debate among scientists about the effect of warmer water on hurricanes. And skeptics say it could have been a coincidence that the medieval storms came during a period of warm water and La Nina conditions.
But the new research on ancient hurricanes is providing a kind of information that modern satellites and aircraft surveillance just can't, says James B. Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University.
"It does provide us some additional clues about how things might change in the long term," he says.
And this study, he says, supports the idea that global warming is one reason we're seeing so many hurricanes these days.
An ‘Increase’ in Big Storms May Just Be Better Detection
Cornelia Dean, The New York Times 12 Aug 09;
Since the mid-1990s, hurricanes and tropical storms have struck the Atlantic Ocean with unusual frequency — or have they? Two new studies suggest that the situation may not be so clear.
One, by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that the high number of storms reported these days may reflect improved observation and analysis techniques, not a meteorological change for the worse. The second, by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and elsewhere, suggests that there were as many storms a thousand years ago, when Atlantic Ocean waters were unusually warm, as today.
The work does not suggest that people should stop worrying about whether global warming increases the threat of bad weather on the Atlantic Coast. But it offers new evidence that predicting what lies ahead may be difficult.
In findings reported this week in The Journal of Climate, the NOAA researchers, led by Christopher W. Landsea, say that several disturbances logged in 2007 and 2008 as tropical storms would never have been identified without satellite observations and new analysis techniques.
The researchers studied storms that played themselves out at sea, either in a day or two or over a longer period, from 1878 to 2008. By the late 19th century, they estimated, meteorologists missed perhaps two of the larger storms each year, and by the 1950s they were picking up on average all but one each year.
Yet the researchers estimate that a century ago, as many as 80 percent of short-lived storms came and went without ever being officially noticed.
Over all, they conclude, storm counts have not changed in the last century.
The other study, described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, used a mathematical model of hurricane activity and measurements of sediment deposits to estimate how often major storms struck the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts of the United States in the last 1,500 years. Led by Michael E. Mann of Penn State, the researchers worked with sediment samples from Puerto Rico, the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Coast from Florida to New England.
Although current numbers are relatively high, they say, both analytical methods suggest that a period of high storm frequency, possibly even higher than today’s, began in the year 900 and lasted until 1200 or so.
The NOAA researchers said their study did not address whether storms would be more powerful in a warmer world. Many researchers believe that such a shift is likely, given that hurricanes and tropical storms draw their energy from the heat of the oceans.
And if today’s ocean warming creates the conditions that prevailed a thousand years ago, Dr. Mann said in a statement, “it may not be just that the storms are stronger, but that there may be more of them as well.”
