Tropical Storm Zeta Forms in Atlantic

APSR writes "Even though the Atlantic hurricane season official ends on November 30th, more storms can form and still count towards the total for the year! According to MSN.com Weather News, Tropical Storm Zeta was formed in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean on December 30th. This storm extends the record-breaking 2005 season to 27 storms, and it's the 6th storm named using the Greek alphabet. According to Wikipedia, Zeta is the latest a tropical cyclone was formed in the Atlantic, forming around 11 AM ET; this dethrones Hurricane Alice of 1954, which formed December 30th around 2 AM ET. The storm itself will continue to strengthen for 12-24 hours, then weaken; it will not likely make landfall." We've already set records this year, as previously reported.

Comments

Re:Stop naming tropical storms...

[niktemadur]

I've wondered about the fact that only in the past four decades we've had the ability to track storms AND measure their strength in a systematic manner, and even then there are problems, i.e. Katrina was originally thought to have struck the Gulf Coast as a Cat 4, yet about a month or two later a more detailed analysis of the data indicated that Katrina was actually a Cat 3.

Furthermore, if you look up Pacific Basin hurricanes on the NOAA page, you will find that Hurricane Linda in 1997 was the strongest ever recorded in the area, but there is an intriguing disclaimer, which goes something like this: Due to lack of consistent monitoring in the Pacific Basin, we have insufficient data for any year before 1996.

Which brings me to my question: How many tropical storms in the last century have gone unnoticed before the advent of satellites, and even if noticed by the occasional cargo boat in some remote shipping route (which is precisely where Tropical Storm Zeta is right now), have been dismissed by captain and crew as a northern gale that strayed too far south? Maybe they just passed tangentially across and thought "no big deal".

As an example, a similar argument can be made for the increase of measured cancer and heart disease related deaths, which supposedly are statistically on the increase, yet in decades past a lot of passings have been categorized as sudden death or natural causes, especially outside the larger cities. You can see it, can't you? Millions of people all over the world going about their daily business in their small towns, with undiagnosed metatastic cancer, incredibly clogged arteries, or whatever else you can think of.

My point is: In general, systematic and accurate compiling of information in some areas goes back less than half a century. Beyond the two parameters (geography and time), applied differently in each case, it's anybody's guess. Now compound this with our inevitable tendency to view things in an anthropocentric as well as cronocentric manner and yikes! How to make heads or tails of all this?

Basically, our elders, through no fault of their own, left us a mess of incomplete info. And to be fair, even if we get our act together of compiling precise data, which we seem to be nobly attempting, there will always be something we missed that'll vex our offspring in a hundred years.