A century's worth of records suggests that hurricanes are on the rise and a warming Atlantic is to blame

Using records dating back to 1855, hurricane researchers say they have uncovered an ongoing rise in the number of Atlantic hurricanes that tracks the increase in sea surface temperature related to climate change. Critics of such a link argue that this trend is merely because of better observations since the dawn of the satellite era in the 1970s. But the authors of the new study say the conclusion is hard to dodge.

"Even if we take the extreme of these error estimates, we are left with a significant trend since 1890 and a significant trend in major hurricanes starting anytime before 1920," say atmospheric scientists Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Update: You can read Holland and Webster's full paper here. [.pdf]. Chris Landsea (specialist with the National Hurricane Center) post a rebuttle here [.pdf] (interestinly enough, prior to the paper's release). Further discussion on both items can be found at Chris Mooney's blog, The Intersection.

More on this news item at National Geographic and New Scientist (UK). For further information, please see the links to the researchers' pages included above. Also, see Chris Mooney's recent book Storm World for more on the history of hurricane study, meteorology and climate science (my current reading).

[I'm going to be very strict in whatever I post here in the future. The public discussion for this seed is for related links and discussion of the science only. Non-related items, friendly or not, will be deleted unless relegated to a separate discussion. In other words, if you feel a need to comment on me or deny otherwise sound science, then clip this to some other group and start a new, private thread. Otherwise, your comment will be deleted. You have been warned. If you are in doubt, then don't post your comment.]

Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

Anticipation of the 2006 hurricane season turned countless families here and in a vast swath of the Southeast into survivalists.

Households stockpiled ready-to-eat meals. They scarfed up emergency radios, propane stoves, satellite phones, shutters, candles, canned goods. Hordes plunked down $500 and up for home generators.

The predictions of another scary storm season and the memory of last year''s record-setting disasters inspired fear and a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Monsoons are critical to India's farmers. If the rains don't come, there can be serious consequences for the country's agriculture-driven economy. Predicting the severity of a drought has been a tricky business, but a new study suggests that the key to better forecasts depends on a detailed understanding of a warming of the Pacific Ocean, called El Niño.

Over the past 132 years, every Indian drought has come in an El Niño year. But not every El Niño has been accompanied by a drought. In 1997, a predicted drought never materialized. Worse, in both 2002 and 2004, unexpected and severe droughts surprised a completely unprepared country.

A month spent on a barren island perched off the western coast of Africa allowed NASA scientists to fly a sensor-laden airplane into storms blowing off the continent. Because such storms can gather strength from warm ocean waters and spin up into hurricanes, this was not simply a daredevil mission but a scientific expedition to track such storms from birth to death. With most of the team back in the U.S., one conclusion proved obvious to them: despite the sensors and volume of data collected, it is difficult to tell which storms would ultimately gather hurricane strength.

As soon as storms get into the eastern ocean they undergo a brief period of intensification. Most of these decay the second and third day that they are in the ocean, and a few of them seem to completely disappear, explains meteorologist Edward Zipser of the University of Utah, who was chief mission scientist for the NASA effort based in the Cape Verde Islands. Or we thought that they had disappeared but then they were sort of reborn in the central or west Atlantic and became named storms.