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El Nino's Absence Is Causing An Active Hurricane Season (mercurynews.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the active-ingredient dept.

Dan Drollette writes: Contrary to some items making the rounds of the Twitterverse, El Nino's are "Kryptonite for hurricanes." The Mercury News reports: "Irma has ripped a path of misery through the Caribbean and is aiming at Florida, but the first seed for its monster size and force was planted on the other side of the world more than six months ago. It happened innocently enough, when a widely anticipated El Nino failed to materialize over the Pacific Ocean. In time, that cleared a path for a hurricane to form in the Atlantic that grew to the size of the state of New York with winds topping 185 miles per hour. El Nino occurs when the Pacific heats up and flusters the atmosphere, setting off a chain reaction that causes wind shear across the Atlantic. Shear is wind blowing in different directions or speeds at various altitudes, and it can be Kryptonite for hurricanes. As powerful as they are, tropical cyclones have delicate structures. Shear can tear them apart. A budding storm can't get started and an established storm can't get strong."

5 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. El Nino and climate changes by ls671 · · Score: 4, Informative

    So what is the relation between El Nino and climate changes already?

    http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2...

    https://www.skepticalscience.c...

    https://e360.yale.edu/features...

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    Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    1. Re:El Nino and climate changes by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Informative

      > 40% of NASA's budget was going to global warming research

      Where did you get that number, by the way ?

      I can't really find it in their 2016 budget. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...

    2. Re:El Nino and climate changes by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Informative

      Most experts I've heard from don't claim there will be more hurricanes, only that hurricanes may do more damage because first, rising sea levels makes for more coastal flooding; and second, warm oceans evaporate more water into the storms such that they rain down harder over land.

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  2. Re:What are they talking about? by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Informative

    The cycles aren't regular, though. It's perfectly possible for an El Nino to come back at any time. We are currently in a neutral zone.

  3. Re:NO! NO! NO! IT'S GLOBAL WARMING!!!!! by hey! · · Score: 4, Informative

    People assume that we'll have more hurricanes because they assume every consequence of AGW will be predictably catastrophic. That may not be a bad rule of thumb, but IIRC IPCC models are actually mixed as to the frequency of hurricanes. That's because hurricanes are the product of chaos; minor changes in initial conditions can tip the result one way or the other. It could be that we have some years with more hurricanes and some with less.

    The one things the model runs are consistent about is that hurricanes under AGW will pack more precipitation, which is kind of an obvious result, but it's nice to have your intuition confirmed every so often. On the other hand, as we saw with Harvey, rain can be a significant component of a hurricane's destructive power.

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