Despite record high sea surface temps and strong agreement it would be a very busy season for tropical cyclones and hurricanes from the dozen or more orgs that forecast the season back in June, the north Atlantic basin was uncannily quiet for the thick...
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Despite record high sea surface temps and strong agreement it would be a very busy season for tropical cyclones and hurricanes from the dozen or more orgs that forecast the season back in June, the north Atlantic basin was uncannily quiet for the thick end of three months. (Ironically, it seems likely that the main reason for the quiet was changes in large-scale climate patterns caused by... global warming.) Anyway, following last week's devastation across the US SE from Hurricane Helene, the Atlantic certainly seems to have woken up with a vengeance now, and is making up for lost time...
#hurricanehelene #hurricane #globalwarming #climate #storms
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@BibbleCo my hypothesis is that as we inject more and more energy into the system, we are shifting the peak activity later.
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@Brad_Rosenheim As I (very much _not_ a climatologist or meteorologist) understand it, the ITCZ bumped northwards over Africa (Incidentally leading to very rare heavy rainfall in the southern Sahara), in turn that bumped the train of tropical waves that usually seed Cabo Verde storms further north, where they were suppressed by the dry / dusty Saharan air layer. I can imagine that northward shift being a binary thing caused by higher temps, which would fit your hypothesis. No doubt many papers are in preparation...
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@BibbleCo It is basically a very uninteresting hypothesis that is agnostic to mechanism. It is synonymous with saying, "This is the new normal." We have already shifted weather patterns so much that our statistical averages, our local knowledge, our actuarial tables mean less and less every year.
That said, your mechanism is plausible. The increased sinuosity of jet streams during rapid warming has been an outcome of several models with different physics, therefore a pretty robust result.
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@Brad_Rosenheim Indeed.
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musing: I wonder how many weather pattern changes are subject to climatological hysteresis, i.e., those actuarial tables, climatological norms etc are amenable to updates after some arbitrary number of decades, capturing new norms; and how many are progressive, chaotic or linear, and therefore not really updatable (on human timescales, anyway) because the next few decades will continue to be different to the last few decades for a very long time to come.
(Clumsily expressed, sorry.)I guess we just have to run the experiment and find out -- and, as luck would have it,..