Occasionally, as some long time readers will know, I touch on aspects of weather in this column and this past month an article was published on the KrisTV website out of Corpus Christi that besides being a interesting bit of scientific data, also has direct impact on the areas this newspaper is published: Hurricanes.
And the issue?
They are slowing down.
James Kossin, a scientist working on climate and weather based research for the United States government, claims that Atlantic storms on landfall are now moving six percent slower over the basin and a whopping twenty percent slower once the storm reaches the shore. That would mean a hurricane that is moving almost three miles-per-hour slower than hurricanes prior to 2016, and last years hurricane season provided some data to back his claims, such as Hurricane Harvey, who set records in terms of rainfall.
A slower moving hurricane would do this as obviously the more it stays in an area, the more wind and rain that area will experience until the hurricane passes that area. It would also raise the severity of the storm surge experienced in such a scenario as well.
Although Kossin has been taken to task by those in his field on the validity of these claims, the logical reason he might have used such a ‘short window’ in his research was the fact that another computer based study into this slowdown, used a much large chunk of data from hurricanes much further in the past and as even Kossin himself admits, the data from the nineteen-seventies and prior is not all that reliable.
One issue is that Kossin’s data, even from a layman’s view, seems to narrow in scope to accurately be able to extrapolate such an idea, although the sixty inches of rain Harvey dropped seems to be haunting such a statement, as the hurricane and it’s ‘nature’ is a undisputed fact and there are lives at stake whenever a hurricane makes landfall.
At the heart of the issue may be the perceived culprit of such a change in the behavior of hurricanes, and that would be climate change, which you may well know to be a debate of major importance and inflammation in the United States and other parts of the world.
To place my opinion in what was to me a ‘straight report’ of information I had found intriguing (and indeed by this paper’s circulation area, important), whenever I think of the climate change issue I have an image in my mind of some elementary school science class in the eighties, long lost to history, but I recall being fascinated by the fact that if you introduce a new factor into any habitat, that factor could make huge changes and repercussion to that same habitat, especially if it was in large numbers or quantity.
Now, as a thinking person, not a Republican or Democrat, not a environmentalist nor an industrialist (who let’s face it, would be the opposing sides if you were to turn climate debate into a boxing match), I cannot help but wonder if every byproduct man has produced from the steam train to the petrol run car has not had some effect on the planet we live on.
Again, this is food for thought, not cemented in fact, especially when studied through a two year window of data as said. To me, with the amount of life changing destruction and poverty hurricanes can bring to a populated area, would dismissing the idea be just as dangerous as accepting it without question?
After all, when we strip away our modern political parties and get right down to it, free thinking and questioning the known status quo is definitively American since this great nation was founded.
