Decisions to name storms draw concern

[rdale]

As season ends, some say center rushes to classify, which costs you

With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.

Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year's 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn "named storm" status.

[..]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5337583.html

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I think it's a pretty slippery slope to start claiming that some tropical storms shouldn't have been classified as such based on central pressure considerations. As far as I know, tropical cyclones have been classified according to maximum sustained winds for many years, so I'm not sure why some seem to insinuate that central pressure is a consideration. We should all know that the pressure-wind relationship in tropical cyclones is not terribly well understood, and it's been seen that the relationship can be very dynamic (both within a single storm and from storm-to-storm). I'm certainly not all that well versed in tropical cyclone dynamics, but we have plenty of data to suggest a pressure-wind relationship is far from concrete. At any rate, isn't this the reason for post-storm analysis? I guess one could argue that there should be some sort of temporal criterion for the classification of a tropical cyclone (i.e. "max winds should be sustained above 39 mph for at least 6 hours", or something like that), but that's a separate issue. If a mass of convection fits the definition of a tropical cyclone or hurricane, then it should be labeled as such. Of course it's not surprising that some storms are classified now that wouldn't have been classified 30 years ago -- we have much better technology now!

It's interesting that QuikSCAT is mentioned, given how some seemed to imply this past summer that QuikSCAT is all but useless and not used much by the NHC folks (things implied in response to Proenza's comments on the potential ramifications of letting the QS system degrade). I recall several cyclones from the past few years that were upgraded almost solely based on QS data.

 

[rdale]

I think the pressure was a 'proxy' for sustainability... I also think there should be a time requirement. It appears that previous directors used that implicitly, now its "see a 39mph wind and name it before the ink dries" mentality is being used.

 

[MClarkson]

This is pure semantics. Unless you are a small boat, and probably not even then, the difference between 'TD XX' and weak 'tropical storm XXXX' is irrelevent.


As for pressure verse wind it is an age old debate. I am personally a fan of using pressure as an indicator of a storms total power, or for ranking the 'strongest' storms. Like most things in meteorology, you gotta take that with a grain of salt though... wind speed is directly a function of pressure gradient as you all know, and that doesnt correspond exactly with minimum central pressure. You can have a small tight wind storm like Andrew or a massive lumbering surge storm like Katrina. The central pressure at landfall was nearly the same and the total economic damage done be each storm was similar(especially when you factor in the vulnerability of new orleans), but those two storms were completely different, surge will always kill more people than wind... and as chasers I think we would all rather have the wind.

Also for weak systems the background pressure matters much more. A 920mb storm is a 920mb monster regardless of anything else... but a 1000mb storm in an area of lower overall pressure is weaker than a 1002mb storm in an area of higher pressure, and those are the smale differences we are talking about when we talk about the difference between a TD or a weak TS.

 

[Shane Young]

This is pure semantics. Unless you are a small boat, and probably not even then, the difference between 'TD XX' and weak 'tropical storm XXXX' is irrelevent.

I'd say yes, except the number of storms each year is receiving heavy attention due to the global warming correlations debate. There are numerous arguments over whether storms should be included from 30-40 years ago... so it's really no wonder we'd reach disagreement over the current ones. To me, it did seem like a handful off namings were suspect over the last few years.

Whatever your opinions, it's an interesting topic, particularly because there is a lot of correlation to how we continue to have an increase in tornadoes each year. Not exactly the same arguments, but still quite similar.

In the end, all we can do is hope that classification ends up being done in as consistent of a fashion as possible.

 

[Mikey Gribble]

With Rdale mentioning "costs you", I came up with a pretty good idea, but I admit it is some what off topic. While the government is squabbling over what deserves names they are inevitably wasting our tax dollars. Well there is an easy way to make money off naming the storms instead of spending it. Why don't we start selling hurricane names, kind of like they do stars? I would pay good money to hear about "Hurricane Mikey" ravaging Florida on the national news. I'm only half serious, but they really could make a lot of extra money selling the names of hurricanes. It would reduce squabbles over whether or not a storm should be named too. If there was a storm of questionable intensity, what the hell, give it a name, then we can make an extra 10k off of some ass that paid to have it named after him.

 

[John Bowles]

With Rdale mentioning "costs you", I came up with a pretty good idea, but I admit it is some what off topic. While the government is squabbling over what deserves names they are inevitably wasting our tax dollars. Well there is an easy way to make money off naming the storms instead of spending it. Why don't we start selling hurricane names, kind of like they do stars? I would pay good money to hear about "Hurricane Mikey" ravaging Florida on the national news. I'm only half serious, but they really could make a lot of extra money selling the names of hurricanes. It would reduce squabbles over whether or not a storm should be named too. If there was a storm of questionable intensity, what the hell, give it a name, then we can make an extra 10k off of some ass that paid to have it named after him.

The star naming stuff is a scam.

"Buy" a star name and the only people who'll know about it are you and the fly-by-night company that sold it to you. It will never ever be recorded in any official catalog anywhere. No observatory will ever be able to show you the star. The stars used are too dim for you to see without a telescope, and a pretty big one at that, and the star may or may not even exist.

And, of course, you'll have to get in line with the 50 other people they sold the same star too...

Its kind of like buying property on the moon. You can't sell what you don't have the rights to in the first place - doesn't stop people from giving them money.

Just FYI.