Sponsor |  FreqWiz | Jul 30, 2007 2:34pm | The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.
The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded.
Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center, said the study is inconsistent in its use of data.
The work, he said, is "sloppy science that neglects the fact that better monitoring by satellites allows us to observe storms and hurricanes that were simply missed earlier. The doubling in the number of storms and hurricanes in 100 years that they found in their paper is just an artifact of technology, not climate change."
But Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the study was significant. "It refutes recent suggestions that the upward trend in Atlantic hurricane activity is an artifact of changing measurement systems," said Emanuel, who was not part of the research team.
Improvements in observation began with aircraft flights into storms in 1944 and satellite observations in 1970. The transitions in hurricane activity that were noted in the paper occurred around 1930 and 1995.
"We are of the strong and considered opinion that data errors alone cannot explain the sharp, high-amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes, each with an increase of around 50 percent in cyclone and hurricane numbers," wrote Webster, of Georgia Institute of Technology, and Holland.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.]
Tropical storms doubled due to global warming, study says |
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