February
28, 2007 Atmospheric
scientists have
uncovered fresh evidence to support the hotly debated theory that
global
warming has contributed to the emergence of stronger hurricanes in the The unsettling trend
is confined
to the Scientists at the
University of
Wisconsin-Madison and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the
National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the finding in the
journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The work
should help resolve some of the controversy that has swirled around two
prominent studies that drew connections last year between global
warming and
the onset of increasingly intense hurricanes. "The debate is not
about
scientific methods, but instead centers around the quality of hurricane
data,"
says lead author James Kossin, a research scientist at UW-Madison's
Cooperative
Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. "So we thought, let's
take
the first step toward resolving this debate." The inconsistent
nature of
hurricane data has been a sore spot within the hurricane research
community for
decades. Before the advent of weather satellites, scientists were
forced to
rely on scattered ship reports and sailor logs to stay abreast of storm
conditions. The advent of weather satellites during the 1960s
dramatically
improved the situation, but the technology has changed so rapidly that
newer
satellite records are barely consistent with older ones. Kossin and his
colleagues
realized they needed to smooth out the data before exploring any
interplay
between warmer temperatures and hurricane activity. Working with an
existing
NCDC archive that holds global satellite information for the years 1983
through
2005, the researchers evened out the numbers by essentially simplifying
newer
satellite information to align it with older records. "This new dataset is
unlike
anything that's been done before," says Kossin. "It's going to serve
a purpose as being the only globally consistent dataset around. The
caveat of
course, is that it only goes back to 1983." Even so, it's a good
start. Once
the NCDC researchers recalibrated the hurricane figures, Kossin took a
fresh
look at how the new numbers on hurricane strength correlate with
records on
warming ocean temperatures, a side effect of global warming. What he found both
supported and
contradicted previous findings. "The data says that the Sea-surface
temperatures may be
one reason why greenhouse gases are exacting a unique toll on the "The average
conditions in
the The "While we can see a
correlation between global warming and hurricane strength, we still
need to
understand exactly why the
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