More Evidence that Global Warming will NOT produce more Hurricanes
The eye of Hurricane Wilma from space.
A new study by researchers from NOAA goes even further in the latest argument that rising ocean temperatures due to global warming will not produce more hurricanes.
Going back to 1878 data, storm numbers have supposedly increased at a rate of 3.8 per century, but the pre-World War II data has many inaccuracies, since the numbers were based on ship observations.
In order to correct for these inaccuracies, Gabriel Vecchi and Thomas Knutson of NOAA tried to superimpose known storm tracks from 1965 to present over known ship tracks from 1878-1965. The duo determined that ships indeed missed many storms, especially during the early years (19th century) compared to the 1960's and that those early ships probably missed about 1/3 of the storms.
Adding that 1/3 to the official record yields a nearly flat trend in storm frequency from 1878-2006 despite a rise in ocean surface temperature of 0.7 celsius.
This study was published in the Journal of Climate.
