NOAA predicts and 95 to 100% chance of above normal hurricane conditions.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane.shtml

Hello Don in Colorado,

Thxs for responding.  Yes, if it gets really bad in the GoM, we can send the oilworkers to look for oil in the offshore Artic-- see this shocking chart of how ice-free it is becoming:

http://www.physorg.com/preview63552889.html

I often wonder if the effects from Global Warming will accelerate faster and create more problems for us than Peakoil.  Consider this next link where scientists have now discovered huge rivers running underneath Antarctic glacial icecaps.
----------
British scientists have discovered rivers the size of the Thames in London flowing hundreds of miles under the Antarctica ice shelf by examining small changes in elevation, observed by ESA's ERS-2 satellite, in the surface of the oldest, thickest ice in the region, according to an article published in Nature this week.

The finding, which came as a great surprise to the scientists, challenges the widely held assumption that subglacial lakes evolved in isolated conditions for several millions of years and raises the possibility that large floods of water from deep within the ice's interior may have generated huge floods that reached the ocean in the past and may do so again.
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http://www.physorg.com/news64754411.html

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

I've read this book, I think its called "Toxic sludge is good for you!" ;)

porsena,

Thanks for the additional insight.

For those that did not see the show: Bottom line is that particulate matter from pollution has an amplifying effect when it interacts with clouds. Tiny microdroplets of water collect or nucleate around each particle of pollution, i.e. fly ash from coal fired plants. Cloud reflectivity is a function of the size and number of such drops. Many small microdrops appears to increase reflectivity and thus increase global dimming. As Prosena notes: the mechanisms are complex and not yet well understood.

The focus of the program and the Indian Ocean study it described was cloud albedo.  Scattering incoming solar radiation back into space is a much more important factor in the energy budget.  Also, it is the high altitude clouds such as cirrus that are effective as heat traps while mid level and low altitude clouds are net sources of infrared radiation away from the surface.  The study you cite doesn't contradict anything in the current understanding of cloud radiative properties.  On the other hand the recognition of the role of pollution in cloud dynamics has been a paradigm shift.  

Stewart,

You can find same-period-last-year data at two places; first (and easiest) is:

http://cwcaribbean.aoml.noaa.gov/data.html

Once there, click on the SST Anomalies button, which gives you a choice of various 5-day intervals for each of several years.  I suggest the night-time data, which is less likely to exhibit transient daytime heating effects.

Second place, if you want longer term averages less prone to transient noise, is at:

http://poet.jpl.nasa.gov/

This is a sort of roll-your-own data shop for satellite data.

I suggest using monthly aggregations of SST Anomaly data from Reynolds/NCEP.  You can run off a couple years' worth "while you wait", unless TOD crowd bogs it down too much.

As for the area to look at, the default box shown there is not bad, but I like to look a bit further east as well.

If you do that, you'll see that:

(1) GoM SST anomalies have been greater, (2006>2005) year-over-year, consistently since at least Jan 2006.

(2) Temps to the east of the Antilles are a bit cooler YOY now than 2005.

I think this may be because the trade winds are either driving less warm surface water toward eastern Atlantic, or maybe even beginning to drive warm surface waters into GoM.

Les Lambert

Yes, your point is excellent about those being hit by the last hurricane are often even more vulnerble the next time. Here's an example from my community:

I live in a flood prone area along the Ohio river.  A couple people I know had their home ruined by floods in 2004.  The US Army corps of Engineers predicted a 35' flood which got broadcast over the news the night that the remnants of Ivan tore through here but 12 hours later the water crested at 44.97 feet.  The undercalled it by 10'.  People went to bed thinking they were ok and went downstairs in the morning to discover the first floor was 3' under water.  OOPS! but the US Corp's underfuning by Washington is a different story.  ANyway, FEMa put a lot of people into nice trailers at a value of $40k each.  4 months later we had another flood.  People in these trailers called FEMA and said will you please send a tow truck to move our trailers up the hill to avoid this flood (the US corps learned a lesson and predicted this one very well in advance).  FEMA would not spend $100 for a tow truck to move these trailers 100' and out of the flood, so they got ruined too and a bunch of people went homeless.

A source:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land.00N.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
Furthermore, the unprecedented area of open sea around Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya (unprecedented for this time of year I mean) hradly suggests a weakening Gulf stream.

smekhovo,

it seems to me that you have described a phenomenon, rather than explained it. Hotter air temperatures over N America and colder over W Europe is the result, what's the cause? A weakening of the thermohaline transfer seems a likely candidate, this is supported by the ocean temperatures.

Those lucky people in the Gulf of Mexico get hurricanes, and in exchange we W Europeans get high heating bills.

Hey, to capture all that storm energy, they need to put wave generators and high-spec windmills in the G of M, instead of oil rigs...

But given what just washed into the GOM, I'd be really leery of eating any of it.

Hey MicroHydro, I think we better shut down this line of questioning pretty quick eh?

No Room! No Room!

Though if it were only TOD readers that would be OK...

It is my understanding that NZ will not accept immigrants older than 40.  (Too costly in the long run.)

Christ on a cracker!  o_O

Poor old Dr. Gray is looking more and more out of it.  That CNN special on global warming gave him short shrift, practically painting him as the batty old uncle, respected for his previous work but considered whacky now.

I had just finished putting the same comparison into the story above as an update.  It seems to be a good 4-5 C (7-9 F) warmer.

Taking a closer look, they seem to have shifted their color scheme, so it isn't quite as bad as it first looks. Last year, yellow corresponded to about 83.5F, this year it's about 80.5F. Still, last year the GOM seems to have been largely 75F and below, this year 81F and below. Looks like a hot time in the old town tonight.

Yikes, we're renting a beach house in north carolina the second week of May with some friends.  We declined the $80 hurricane cancellation insurance thinking the odds of a bad storm that early are pretty slim.  I'm hoping I don't end up regretting this decision.

I am keeping my old 240D at least half full of diesel (9 gallons min) and at least $150 in cash hidden in a book at home.

Last time I took out 3 people without cars, but fewer car-less people today.

Alan

I can't address where the "Annual Total Number of Tornadoes" chart came from, but "for those of you keeping score at home," as the baseball announcers say, the NOAA Storm Prediction Center keeps data showing month-month comparisions of tornado occurences for the last three years (and against 10 and 30 year averages) here: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/torn/monthlytornstats.html.

Also, archived data of U.S. tornadoes, hail, and severe winds going back to the 1950s is available here:  http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/historical.html.
There is a plotting application available here:  http://www.spc.noaa.gov/software/svrplot2/

As we've been discussing here since March, 2006 is off to a very fast start.

Not sure if this was the exact source, but this page has tons of maps, graphs, etc on tornadoes and other severe weather.

Notice the fatalities have decreased dramatically at the same time the number of storms appears to increase.

Given the amount of study given to tornadoes, thunderstorms, etc. I'm not so sure the graph is skewed simply by having better radar.  This has been the subject of intense study for decades.

I have no idea what the real answer to that is, but if you just look at 1970 on up, you still see a pretty fari trend.  It would be hard to imagine that being due to more spotters and better radar.

I've got to agree with the questioner here...the chart starts to spike in the same period that the first civilian weather radars were going online. Also, the countryside in the U.S. was A LOT less populated during the years when the activity seems to have been so much less. (however, I'm not arguing that the chart doesn't show a trend) Surely, many storms -even if someone actually witnessed the funnel- never made it into the weather service files.

That would be my guess too ... and checking a "tornado myths" page:

11.  Reported tornadoes are increasing in frequency.

(TRUE, but, is it real?  It is assumed that since the number of days with tornadoes is NOT increasing nor are the larger tornadoes increasing in number, just the smaller ones, that the increase might be the result of better reporting of the smaller tornadoes).

http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/nebraska/tornado-myths.html

If the number of large tornadoes is indeed not increasing ... well, I'd take that as the bottom line.

(This reminds me of the old global warming / tornado book "heavy weather" ... hmmm, I think of it as beeing old, but apparently it was first published in '94 link)

Radar was first developed during WWII so the jump in the 50's probably corresponds to the first widespread applications of weather radar.  The increases from there through the 80's may be due to actual increases or to the increased skills of the weather observers in predicting and spotting them (specifically hook echos).  The drop through the 80's is rather interesting however, because during that time global temperatures decreased (sparking controversy of Global Cooling, of course).  In 1988 WSR88D (Weather Service Radar 1988 Doppler) was introduced, commonly just called Doppler radar, which greatly increased the ability to spot the cyclonic action associated with supercells and tornado activity.  So the introduction of doppler corresponds well with the increase in the 90's.

Right, some years are bad for the U.S. because a lot of hurricanes hit even though there aren't that many hurricanes, while other years are bad because there are just a lot of hurricanes.

To get a better idea of storm activity, counting the named tropical storms/hurricanes provides an objective measure. Here are the number of named tropical storms/hurricanes from the NOAA archives for recent years:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastall.shtml

2000   14
2001   15
2002   12
2003   16
2004   15
2005   27

It is clear that 2005 is the outlier here. All the other years were in the range 12-16. 2004 was not particularly bad.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2006, but I don't think it is possible to say with much certainty whether it will be more like 2000-2004 or like 2005. For reference, the Foresight Exchange online prediction game is currently guessing 19 named storms in 2006.