Comments on: Hurricane Data Compilation Thread

By: dtngwyfr

dtngwyfr — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 04:27:17 +0000

Sweet site , I hadn’t noticed climateaudit.org before till my friend told me about it.
Keep up the great work! I will be contributing more at climateaudit.org

Looking forward to some good new friends here at climateaudit.org

By: David Smith

David Smith — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 02:46:12 +0000

A paper on Hadley Cell and tropical/subtropical circulation changes since 1950 is given here .

By: David Smith

David Smith — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:54:40 +0000

A well-written article on tropical atmospheric circulation is given here . These Chinese researchers studied Hadley cells and associated features. Nice cross-sections of the ITCZ and circulation cells. My opinion is that some of the mystery about climate shifts will disappear as we learn more about the behavior of these massive heat removal systems. The Southern and Northern circulations have the same general features but differ in ways (see diagrams) that might affect their ability to remove heat. Perhaps at times one hemisphere's Hadleys and Ferrels do a better job of removing heat than does the other. As a side note, if I remember correctly, Tim Ball mentioned that the GCMs do a rather poor job of modeling these important circulations.

By: David Smith

David Smith — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:14:59 +0000

A good general reference on meteorology, including tropical weather, is here . It is slightly technical but well-written and understandable.

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:45:00 +0000

There is extensive information on individual West Pacific storms from old annual reports of the Joint Typhoon operation, now online. An example is here https://metocph.nmci.navy.mil/jtwc/atcr/1959atcr/pdf/section5.pdf. There’s a lot of data on individual storm tracks that could be easily digitized with a little clerical work.

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:14:23 +0000

Judith Curry has archived track data as used here http://www.eas.gatech.edu/research/data.htm. Excellent.

A discussion of the topic is here http://www.wunderground.com/education/webster.asp

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:58:52 +0000

#25. I’m not planning to get into hurricante track QC issues – I don’t have the time; I’m already spending more time on this than I should without previously finishing some proxy papers. I’m just going to work through some of the calculations and see if I can repeat them.

By: Judith Curry

Judith Curry — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:34:02 +0000

Re the hurricane data quality issue. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the data outside the NATL is problematic. I suggest a two pronged approach. Prong 1: use exactly the same data as Emanuel to assess what inferences can actually be made from the time series of SST and PDI in NATL and WPAC from 1949-2005 (and ignore data quality issues, just focus on auditing the statistical methods). Prong 2: use the NATL data record (HURDAT) since 1851 to see what can be determined from the longer time series with varying levels of uncertainty as you go back in time. If you agree with this approach, then the data issues become: making sure you have the same data as used by Emanuel, and then sorting through the NATL data quality issues. sorting through multiple datasets, many of dubious quality, could be huge time sink and not really get us anywhere. Lets have some discussion about what data sets we are going to look at, before digging into the various warts associated with a number of different data sets.

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:08:50 +0000

Details and script for collating hurricane and storm track data is here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=855.

By: Carl Smith

Carl Smith — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:27:03 +0000

Re: #22 – Steve, any JTWC 80+ numbers in best tracks data are those systems that were not identified as storms in real time, but were later found to be storms when re-analysing the data.

This happens from time to time with marginal systems, mainly due to the pressures of getting information out at regular intervals with only a small number of mets working at any particular time, as the poor satellite imagery presentation of many maginal systems combined with lack of other supporting data means it can take a pro-met many hours of careful analysis of multiple satellite images before making a judgement that it is in fact a storm, and time may not be available to do this process properly until after the season when the best tracks are being put together.

Most marginal systems that fall between the cracks in real time are a long way from inhabited areas where other data can help making such a judgement, and in real time they are usually being tracked as ‘invest’ systems that have potential to develop and are assigned 90+ numbers, so if anyone in a boat or plane is intending to be in the vicinity they can usually get enough info to see that the weather could deteriorate in the area.