Hurricane Season 2005: The End
Epsilon is still spinning out in the Atlantic, but the official hurricane season is now over. Jeff Masters has a good summary on his blog. This season was extraordinary, any way you slice it. May it never happen again. As much as I admire the power and beauty of hurricanes, the cost in property and lives simply isn't worth it.
Part of what made this season so traumatic wasn't just the number of storms (26). It was the fact that so many were so powerful and so many hit land. Compare 1995, which had 19 named storms, to this year. Though 1995 had the most tropical systems since 1933 prior to this season, few of those systems hit land. This year, however, most of the systems that formed affected land. Six of the seven major hurricanes that formed hit land. Three, possibly four, of those storms peaked at category 5 strength. If the number is not revised and stays at 3, that still means that half of the category 5 hurricanes to form in the past decade formed this year. If it is revised to four storms, half of the category 5 hurricanes of the last 15 years will have formed this year.
In case I haven't shown enough that I'm a weather geek, I compiled data from 1950 to this year. For each year, I took the number of systems in each category and multiplied them by the category number (tropical storms counted at 0.5). Then I added them together to get a rough estimate of the intensity of that season. See the graph below. With this system, it is possible for a season with a small number of very intense storms to be "more intense" than a season with many named storms but few very strong systems. Notice that 1950, with only 13 systems but 8 of them major hurricanes, beats out every year but 2005. You can see clearly from this that we were in a lull in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Now we're back in a high intensity cycle, which could last another decade or so.
So, here's hoping for a cold winter that will cool the ocean so that next year's hurricane season isnt' quite this bad.
Part of what made this season so traumatic wasn't just the number of storms (26). It was the fact that so many were so powerful and so many hit land. Compare 1995, which had 19 named storms, to this year. Though 1995 had the most tropical systems since 1933 prior to this season, few of those systems hit land. This year, however, most of the systems that formed affected land. Six of the seven major hurricanes that formed hit land. Three, possibly four, of those storms peaked at category 5 strength. If the number is not revised and stays at 3, that still means that half of the category 5 hurricanes to form in the past decade formed this year. If it is revised to four storms, half of the category 5 hurricanes of the last 15 years will have formed this year.
In case I haven't shown enough that I'm a weather geek, I compiled data from 1950 to this year. For each year, I took the number of systems in each category and multiplied them by the category number (tropical storms counted at 0.5). Then I added them together to get a rough estimate of the intensity of that season. See the graph below. With this system, it is possible for a season with a small number of very intense storms to be "more intense" than a season with many named storms but few very strong systems. Notice that 1950, with only 13 systems but 8 of them major hurricanes, beats out every year but 2005. You can see clearly from this that we were in a lull in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Now we're back in a high intensity cycle, which could last another decade or so.
So, here's hoping for a cold winter that will cool the ocean so that next year's hurricane season isnt' quite this bad.
posted by SpakKadi at 7:16 PM
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