Can Hurricane Activity Be Predicted Out to Five Years With Skill?
December 19th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
This is the subject of an article today in the Houston Chronicle by Eric Berger on the RMS expert elicitation. It is also the subject of a draft paper that I have begun to circulate for comments. The paper’s title is:
United States Hurricane Landfalls and Damages:
Can One to Five Year Predictions Beat Climatology?
the paper begins as follows:
The answer to the question posed in the subtitle is, unfortunately, no. This paper explains why skillful prediction of United States hurricane landfalls and damages is not possible in the short term, defined here as a time period of one to five years. A “skillful” prediction is one that improves upon expectations derived from the statistics of the long-term historical record.
If you’d like a copy for comment, please send me an email, pielke@colorado.edu.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Slightly off topic:
Roger, I used graph 4c of Pielke et al, Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States:1900-2005 in my blog to rebut the alarmistic damage graph of Pier Vellinga in his inaugural adress as climate professor at Wageningen University.
Is that the most appropriate graph or do you have a better suggestion?
see http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/bericht/237382
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Hans-
We held a workshop in partnership with Munich Re on exactly this graph that Pier Vellinga has shown. The purpose of the workshop was to explain why we see the increasing damage trend due to storms and floods.
You can see the report here:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sparc/research/projects/extreme_events/munich_workshop/workshop_report.html
It was cited in the IPCC AR4. Some key findings relevant to your blog post include:
“8. Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.
11. Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions
13. In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.”
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sparc/research/projects/extreme_events/munich_workshop/executive_summary.pdf
December 26th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Thanks, I added your comment to my blog (with a link to prometheus).