Have There Been More Hurricanes In Recent Years Because of Technology?

    Have there been more hurricanes in recent years? Is that from climate change? Or is it just an advancement of technology?

The National Hurricane Center's Christopher W. Landsea, Chief of the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch, and Eric Blake, a Senior Hurricane Specialist, studied this topic in a recent article of theirs.

About 15 years ago, scientists and researchers found that the number of hurricanes had increased over the past hundred years.

But interestingly, during the 1940s and 1950s, there was an increase in short-lived or low-impact storms. At the same time, there were more aircraft over the oceans and the Hurricane Hunters began missions looking for hurricanes. 

Last year, nearly 42 trillion dollars of damage were caused by tropical cyclones. This included a record-breaking 13 in the U.S., six of which were in Louisiana. Down in Central America, trillions of dollars in damage was delivered by destructive hurricanes such as Hurricane Iota. 

Out of the record-breaking 30 named storms (storms that reached 39 mph winds), a third of them lasted for under three days, several for not even 48 hours. 

The black curve in the image above shows a smoothed trendline in the data to eliminate variability from year-to-year. (Graphic: NHC). 

While storms like Hurricane Laura might have been noticed even a hundred years ago, but not storms like Tropical Storm Omar- which lasted for not much more than a day and did little to anyone. 

Follows is a part of an NHC blog article: 

Today we have many advanced tools to help monitor tropical and subtropical cyclones across the entire Atlantic basin such as geostationary and low-earth orbiting satellite imagery, the Hurricane Hunter aircraft of the U.S. Air Force Reserve and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), coastal weather radars, and scatterometers (radars in space that provide surface wind measurements).  In addition, the instrumentation and measuring techniques used by the satellites, aircraft and radars are continually improving.  These technological advances allow us at the National Hurricane Center to better identify, track, and forecast tropical and subtropical cyclones with an accuracy and precision never before available.  This is great news for coastal residents and mariners, since these tools help us provide the best possible forecasts and warnings to aid in the best preparedness for these life-threatening systems.

Such technology, though, was not available back at the advent of the U.S. Signal Service’s tropical monitoring in the 1870s.  Without these sophisticated tools, meteorologists in earlier times not only had difficulty in forecasting tropical cyclones, but they also struggled in even knowing if a system existed over the open ocean.  In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the only resource hurricane forecasters could use to monitor tropical cyclones were weather station observations provided via telegraph.  Such an approach is problematic for observing – much less forecasting – tropical cyclones that develop and spend most of their lifecycle over the open ocean.  Here’s a timeline of critical technologies that have dramatically improved tropical meteorologists’ ability to “see” and monitor tropical cyclones:

The upshot of all of these advances in the last century is much better identification of the existence of tropical cyclones and their strongest winds (or what meteorologists call “Intensity”).  So, the further one goes back in time, the more tropical cyclones (and portions of their life cycle) were missed, even for systems that may have been a major hurricane. 

There was increase in ship traffic beginning in the middle of the 20th century. 

Plots showing the density of shipping traffic across the northern Atlantic Ocean between 1878-1914, 1915-1945, and 1946-1965. White and blue areas indicate little to no ship traffic, while oranges and red indicate a high level of ship traffic. 

In research that Chris Landsea and company study in 2010’s Journal of Climate, they discovered that weak, short-lived (lasting less than or equal to two days) named storms – aka “Shorties” – had shown a dramatic increase in occurrence over time. There were only about one a year in HURDAT2 up until the 1920s, about 3 per year from the 1930s to the 1990s, and jumping up to around 5 per year since 2000.

By adjusting older data to add in missed storms in the most reasonable amount, one would get this: 

This shows that in fact, while there is a general rise in storms in recent years, it actually is not as bad as it seems. Also evident is that fluctuations occur in 30 to 45 year periods of higher and lower amounts. 

All things considered, advancements in technology are a major factor in the increase in hurricane levels. In fact, the record-breaking 2020 season might not have been any more busy than 1887.