Monday, June 30, 2014

June 29: Atlantic Blob,Update A

Just a quick update for now because this Atlantic blob is not quite cooked… it is relaxing near the Bahamas, sipping pina coladas, as one does. ;-)

The circulation has slowly been improving over the last day or so as it moved southward from the South Carolina coast. It is now centered just slightly north of Grand Bahama. It has struggled to become a fully-fledged storm (first one would be Arthur) because dry air around the blob has inhibited a lot of convection forming near the center, as you can see:
The sea surface temperature is about 29 deg C., with the upper 75-100m above 26 deg C. This is definitely warm enough to help the storm to develop (storms need sea surface temperatures of 26.5 deg C to develop) and it has helped to produce a few buckets of rain over parts of Florida (as I’m sure you may have noticed if you are there), to the west of the center of circulation.
Officially the forecast is for it to move to the south and west, and then loop back to the north and east, which should take it into southern Florida in the next few days – but because it is quite poorly formed at the moment, this may not happen. Given the dry air and proximity to land, I am not certain that it will develop into a fully-fledged tropical storm (the current official forecast is for a Tropical Depression in the next 2 days), but even if it does, it will mostly be a rainmaker (with some interesting thunderstormy sort of weather).

I’ll definitely be back tomorrow. We may have a Tropical Depression by then… or even a very weak Tropical Storm King Arthur! ;-)
Ciao!
J.

Blogs archived at http://jyotikastorms.blogspot.com/
Twitter @JyovianStorm
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DISCLAIMER: These remarks are just what I think/see regarding tropical storms - not the opinion of any organization I represent. If you are making an evacuation decision, please heed your local emergency management and the National Hurricane Center's official forecast and the National Weather Service announcements. This is not an official forecast. If I "run away, run away" (Monty Python), I'll let you know.
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Friday, June 20, 2014

June 19: Are female hurricanes really deadlier than male hurricanes?

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. – Shakespeare, circa 1590s.

Earlier this month a study came out of Illinois and Arizona, two states well-known for being hit by hurricanes (!), about how female-named hurricanes cause more deaths than male-named hurricanes because people just aren’t as afraid of women as they are of men (you can find the actual article here). The study was conducted by a team from these assorted expert backgrounds: business affairs (including marketing), psychology, women and gender in global perspectives, and statistics. I'm sure everyone is an expert in their arena, but obviously this is not a serious scientific meteorological study!

The data is available on the link to the publication above, so I downloaded it and had a little playtime with numbers (woo hoo! :-)). Here are just a few reasons why I think this study is a bit iffy.

1. GENDER OR STRENGTH?
The naming of storms started in 1950. From 1950-1952, storms were given names from the World War II spelling alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy etc.), so they weren’t male or female names. From 1953-1978, hurricanes were ONLY given female names. Male storm names were not used until 1979, after which they were used alternately with female names.

The study used storm names from 1950-2012. For a fair study, storms should only be included from 1979 onwards.

Also, the authors decided to allocate genders to the non-gender alphabet names from 1950-1952, so, for example, they classify ‘Easy’ as a female name (hmm… interesting choice. Freud would have a field day!). Here are their number of storms per category from 1950-2012 and, using the same dataset, the numbers from 1979-2012:

 
1950-2012
1979-2012
Cat 1 (F/M)
22/14
10/13
Cat 2 (F/M)
15/6
8/6
Cat 3 (F/M)
21/7
9/5
Cat 4 (F/M)
3/2
0/2
Cat 5 (F/M)
1/1
0/1
                                (F = female, M = male)

Outlier storms such as Katrina and Gilbert are not in the data, so kudos to the authors for not including those.

In my study of using only storms from 1979 onwards, we see no cat 4 or 5 female name storms – those big scary ones that people really pay attention to. The average intensity of female storms from 1950-2012 was 2.12 compared to 1.96 from 1979-2012. The average intensity of male storms from 1950-2012 was category 2 compared to 2.11 from 1979-2012. So from 1979-2012, on average, the weaker and less damaging storms happened to be the female named storms.

Generally, people are more cavalier about weaker storms compared to stronger storms, regardless of name. Which would you evacuate for, a cat 1 or a cat 4? This study could really be about how more people die in weaker storms than stronger storms, because they don’t feel as threatened by the intensity. We can put gender aside.

2. CAUSE OF DEATH?
Although they did remove outliers like Katrina (1,833 deaths) and Gilbert (433 deaths), what we don’t know is how the deaths occurred. Were they because people took the storm seriously and died during evacuation? For example, the day before Hurricane Rita made landfall in 2005, 23 people were evacuated from a nursing home, but died because their bus caught fire!

3. STATISTICS ARE GREAT!
Correlation should not be confused with causation! Although a flashy title, this study does not prove that “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes”. If that’s the case, then here are a few more amazing facts (Note: I have not personally checked the data, but full credit for source is given below)…

• Did you know that the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming-pool could be decreased if only Nicholas Cage stopped appearing in films?

• Think there is a need for more Civil Engineering doctorates in the US? Well obviously Americans need to eat more mozzarella cheese to make that happen!
And if it’s more Computer Science doctorates in the US that you are after, then you really need to head on down to your local video game arcade:

• Here’s a useful one: the per capita consumption of cheese (hmm… cheese :-)) correlates with the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets…
but the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets is correlated with revenue generated at ski facilities…
 … so obviously, if ski lodges are having a bad season (no snow, avalanche, summertime etc), then they should increase their cheese-based meals, thus by-passing the bedsheet/deaths thing entirely and saving everyone a lot of bother!

• And, finally, the real reason why honey producing bee colonies have decreased over the past few years is not because of changes to their environment, but because of the increase in the number of juvenile arrests for possession of marijuana. I guess you can only have honey or marijuana, not both.

These graphs and correlations are just a small selection from the hilarious Spurious Correlations website (check it out as there are more!! :-)). Thanks to Tyler Vigen, who put it together!

So, in conclusion, the real take-home message is that all scientists should have someone from their Dept. of Marketing as a co-author… the media attention, apparently, is amazing!

Oh, and by the way, if you come across a Hurricane Jyotika, be afraid. Be very afraid. Run for the hills. Or even better, run to Illinois or Arizona.

For those of you in in Florida and on the east coast… I’m watching that blob and may be back tomorrow…

Over and out (for now!),
J.

Blogs archived at http://jyotikastorms.blogspot.com/
Twitter @JyovianStorm
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DISCLAIMER: These remarks are just what I think/see regarding tropical storms - not the opinion of any organization I represent. If you are making an evacuation decision, please heed your local emergency management and the National Hurricane Center's official forecast and the National Weather Service announcements. This is not an official forecast. If I "run away, run away" (Monty Python), I'll let you know.
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Friday, June 06, 2014

June 5: Gulf of Mexico Blob, Update A

Well that didn't take too long, did it? What happened to my quiet season? Huh. Oh, I forgot to say in my season opening remarks that even though the forecast is for a below-average number of storms this year, it only takes one. The biggest example is, of course, Hurricane Andrew which was the first named storm of the 1992 hurricane season (a season with only 6 named storms, of which 4 were hurricanes) and hit S. Florida and Miami as a cat 5 on the 24th of August! So be prepared and get your supplies in order! My usual supplies list... batteries and flashlight, two tubs of ice cream (different flavours to avoid boredom), twelve bottles of wine (mostly red – no point getting too many white if there is no fridge to cool it in!), first-aid kit, some ice cream cones (optional), canned food, batteries for the camera/video/radio, a non-electronic wine bottle opener, smart phone to tweet from, a non-electronic can opener, sunscreen, good books to read, insect repellant, hand-held fan, cheese, bags of PG Tips in a ziploc bag etc. ;-)

So officially there is a small blob (technical jargon for 'a bunch of clouds loitering with intent' ;-)) in the southwest Gulf of Mexico, very near to the Bay of Campeche (but mostly over Mexico).

Although the National Hurricane Center has been slowly upgrading the likelihood of this blob developing into a storm over the past couple of days, it really doesn't look like much to me. The circulation is pretty poor and is connected to a front, and it doesn't have too much rain as you can see in this infra-red satellite movie (ooh...a movie!! quick, get the popcorn! ;-)):


What you actually see here are the remains of Tropical Storm Boris that merged with a low pressure front that's been hanging out down there in the Gulf for days. Whoa! Where did Tropical Storm Boris come from, you ask? No, I have not had one too many glasses of wine thank you very much (too early in the season for that! ;-)). Although there's not been much in the Atlantic so far, the Eastern Pacific Hurricane season (which started on May 15th) has been a bit busy with cat 5 Hurricane Amanda last week (that fizzled in the Pacific) and Tropical Storm Boris this week. TS Boris ran into the southwest coast of Mexico yesterday, bringing a bunch 'o' rain to Mexico and Guatemala. That's the story of Boris.

Our Gulf of Mexico blob is interacting with Mexico too much to develop into anything at the moment, but there is a small (very small) possibility that it will develop into something (first name is Arthur) if it moves away from land ... so something I'll definitely keep an eye on!

<Science Alert!> It's not too surprising if storms do pop up in the Gulf this early in the season, but the good news is that they would be dinky little things that generally bring much needed rain and not too much wind. Here is a figure that I made a few years ago that shows the track of all storms from 1851 to 2005, divided into the month they formed/existed (graph credit: MOI!).
You can see that in the early and latter parts of the season we have storms that develop in the western Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean region. But because they are so close to land and early in the season things are still warming up, they don’t usually have time to develop. During the peak months it’s another story! Storms develop in the eastern Atlantic and have lots of space and time (but no TARDIS, thankfully!) to get nice and strong before getting to land. This figure also shows why we have a ‘hurricane season’. 97% of all storms form between June 1 and Nov 30, with 78% forming during the peak months of Aug-Sept-Oct (stats from Landsea’s 1993 paper). But you can see that every so often we do get storms that develop outside of the season (including January!). Not common, but not impossible! <End Science Alert!>

I'll be back tomorrow if that Gulf Blob makes any dodgy moves, otherwise I'll be back later. 

Ciao for now!
J.

Blogs archived at http://jyotikastorms.blogspot.com/
Twitter @JyovianStorm

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DISCLAIMER: These remarks are just what I think/see regarding tropical storms - not the opinion of any organization I represent. If you are making an evacuation decision, please heed your local emergency management and the National Hurricane Center's official forecast and the National Weather Service announcements. This is not an official forecast. If I "run away, run away" (Monty Python), I'll let you know.
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Sunday, June 01, 2014

June 1: Start of the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season

Welcome back my friends! The sun is shining, the birds are tweeting, and ‘Tis the start of ye grande Atlantic Hurricane Season of Two-Thousand and Fourteen (I just watched ‘Lincoln’). I hope you all had a very pleasant and relaxing off-season and are back for some science and some fun.

My off-season was SUPER DUPER busy… in case you haven’t heard, I moved to Los Angeles, California, and am now living a glamorous Hollywood life! ;-)


My entries this year will be peppered with phrases like “oopsie, another earthquake”, “hmm, that fire is awfully close”, “I had a very nice chat with Keanu today”, “traffic was a breeze, it only took me 2 hours to drive 15 miles”, and of course, “is that an alien? Oh, no, it’s just someone with botox”.

Before I get into what a super cool science geek like me (!!) is doing out here in the land of movie-making magic, let’s have a quick chit chat about hurricanes (as one does occasionally). This is shaping up to be a quiet season, partly because the temperatures in the Atlantic are cooler and partly because the atmospheric pressure fields have shifted because there is an El Nino in swing (not to be confused with a swinging el nino). The predictions are mostly below-normal to near-normal. Here are some of the official predictions:

Tropical Storm Risk (prediction date: 27 May): 12 (+/-4) named storms, 5 (+/-3) hurricanes, 2 (+/- 2) major hurricanes.
Colorado State University/Gray-Klotzbach (prediction date: 10 April): 9 named storms, 3 hurricanes, 1 major hurricanes.
UK Met Office (prediction date: 16 May): 10 (+/-3) named storms, 6 (+/-3) hurricanes.
NOAA (prediction date: 22 May): 8-13 named storms, 3-6 hurricanes, 1-2 major hurricanes.

The average season (based on all storms from 1950-2013) has 11 named storms, with 6 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes (category 3 or higher).

If you are reading my amazingly fabulous and award-breaking opening remarks for the first time (and even if you aren’t), here are my top ten background notes about this blog so you know what you are getting into for the season (you can always watch reality TV if you prefer, or, for even more entertainment, I’ve found sitting in LA rush-hour traffic can be a barrel of laughs):

1. These updates are about fun, forecasting, and education... and tropical storms (and whatever else pops into my head that may, with some imagination, fit those three words). It is just what I think.

2. I have a British sense of humoUr... you have been warned.

3. This is my hobby - sometimes you'll get one update a day, sometime four. If you are really lucky, you won't get any. If you wish to pay me to write, let me know and I'll send out updates as frequently as you like.

4. I hope you like Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, and The IT Crowd. And other funny stuff.

5. If you have any questions (preferably about tropical storms), please do not hesitate to ask. I will be happy to make up the answers for you. I can also cut and paste from previous entries (it’s a talent, I know) so if I say something or use some "scientific jargon" (ooh ahh, how thrilling), please ask me about it.

6. I often write tongue-in-cheek, which sometimes hurts my cheek but what can you do? Gentle sarcasm, irony, and puns are all acceptable forms of communication. Unfortunately they don't always translate in writing so please don't be offended - like Planet Earth, I'm "Mostly Harmless" (Douglas Adams). Have a piece of chocolate or a drink instead.

7. I'm sure every cloud in the Atlantic is exciting to some but, unless I'm bored, I'll usually write about those that I think have a chance of developing.

8. Despite what you may have heard, I am not always right. But then neither is anyone else. Forecasting is complicated. Sometimes the crystal ball gets smudges and you are all out of Windex to clean it and the store is closed. So PLEASE pay attention to the National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service and your Emergency Managers - especially when a storm is looming because they have the most up-to-date information!!

9. If you are reading this via email, I highly recommend switching to the website (
http://jyotikastorms.blogspot.com). It’s much prettier. And I am working towards transitioning to the website only format anyway… as a part of my top-secret grand plan to take over the world (bwa haa haa - evil laughter in case you were wondering).

10. I confess, I am a twit. I am on twitter (@jyovianstorm). Twitter is cool. Just like bow-ties are (still) cool. (Dr. Who).  


Now you know what’s what, the last question for the day is: why on earth would I move from Florida, a land of tropical storms, to California, a land of earthquakes? Two reasons. First (and I have to put this first for the sake of peace and harmony ;-)), so my hubby and I can live in the same place (a novel concept, I know!). Second, I got a groovy new job with an organization that deals with the future!! Perfect for a sci-fi aficionado! :-) I now work at the XPRIZE Foundation (xprize.org) (woo hoo)! XPRIZE designs and operates Global Prize Competitions that result in new technologies to tackle the Grand Challenges of our time – from space ships to real Tricorders* (Star Trek)! My piece is to help run an international competition to develop accurate and cheap ocean acidification sensing technologies.  
(*If you don’t know what a Tricorder is… sigh. Sigh AND much shaking of my head. It’s a hand-held device (currently seen in Star Trek) that allows someone to make an accurate medical diagnosis of a number of ailments. Look it up! And if you want a chance to win an actual real Star Trek Tricorder signed by the five Star Trek captains, check out the Tricorder Federation: http://www.tricorderfederation.org/).

I’m sure I’ll be talking about future technologies and what nots throughout the season too. But now it’s time to skidaddle… I’ll be back when we have the next storm! (Er… unless I do actually meet Keanu Reeves, in which case there will be a dedicated Keanu update!)
Ciao for now!
J.

p.s. webpage count at start of season (mostly for my own edification): 72, 350-ish

Blogs archived at http://jyotikastorms.blogspot.com/
Twitter @JyovianStorm

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DISCLAIMER: These remarks are just what I think/see regarding tropical storms - not the opinion of any organization I represent. If you are making an evacuation decision, please heed your local emergency management and the National Hurricane Center's official forecast and the National Weather Service announcements. This is not an official forecast. If I "run away, run away" (Monty Python), I'll let you know.
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