Saharan Sand & Hurricane Prediction
Monday, August 6, 2007 
I have written before about modeling earthquakes and hurricanes - two phenomena are often not covered in homeowners insurance because they are Acts of God. There is still a long way to go before these are understood to the satisfaction of a predominance of scientists.
But what about prediction? With hurricane season about to start in earnest in the Atlantic, it has been pretty quiet. How are hurricanes predicted, and how good are these predictions?
El Niño events and hurricanes are highly correlated, and hence the Niño is part of every hurricane forecasters toolkit/ There has been a lot of publicity of late indicating a strong correlation between Saharan sand storms and hurricane activity, suggesting that sand activity would complement El Nino as a predictor.
While no one would dispute the value of another correlate for hurricane activity, I did notice the typical media confusion between understanding what was going on, and what was purely a prediction based on a correlation. I was just about to write one of my typical rants when I came across a blog that already took the media to task back in 2006. Written by Daniel Collins from UW-Madison on his Down To Earth blog, the post title says it all: Bad Science Journalism: Linking Hurricanes and Dust
UW-Madison is where a lot of resarch is carried out. Their press release is quoted by Collins. I include the passage most salient to the discussion here about understanding vs. prediction:
While the UW-Madison work doesn't confirm that dust storms directly influence hurricanes, it does provide compelling evidence that the two phenomena are linked in some way. "What we don't know is whether the dust affects the hurricanes directly, or whether both [dust and hurricanes] are responding to the same large scale atmospheric changes around the tropical Atlantic," says Foley. "That's what future research needs to find out."
On a recent family vacation to Florida we were talking with a real estate agent about hurricanes in that area (northeast Florida) and he described a relationship between distance from the Gulf Stream and hurricane frequency and ferocity. While this sounds plausible - i.e. that there is a correlation, I need to see much more data before I would do anything hasty - such as making a large-scale real estate investment!
(The beautiful sandstorm picture is from the Abrangente blog. It reminds me very much of a scene from Bertolucci's 1990 version of The Sheltering Sky.)
Reader Comments (7)
How about another media jumbled aspect of hurricanes? The true effect of global climate change on extreme weather patterns. While many people like to take one side of this argument very heavily (be it for or against) there is rarely a middle ground. An intellectual and orderly look at weather stats is in order.
Al Gore strongly correlates increased water temps in the Gulf to increased storm action. While the thermodymanics surely indicate that this is the case, it is not wrong, and even necessary to delve deeper into whether the increased frequency of these storms can indeed be tied to human fault of excessive emissions.
I certainly advocate energy/resource frugality, but I am hesitant to jump so quickly to a mindset of "total emminent global disaster" as a result of a few "Katrinas". The media here is as much to blame as the scientists who feed them the information. The Clinton administration attempted to pay off scientists to increase data supporting global climate change as much as current administration has been known to suppress it. The media gets pulled along making conclusions on little more than a public statement released by a spokesperson and through a government official who selectivley chose the data from several scientific studies.
To tie this in with the original post: We have not had impeccable success with storm prediction/tracking. It is hard to think that despite this we can have enough knowledge to understand (fully at least) the underlying climactic issues invovled in the recent weather phenomena.
Thanks for your comment...
I deliberately avoided the political side of things in my post - and wished to focus on media reporting only in this post. Note that I am assigning blame to either side (scientist or media). In fact, I assume that most scienists do describe their work accurately when interviewed by media, only to see the final article distorted b/c of a lack of knowledge/appreciation for the nuances of scientific and mathematical modeling of natural events such as hurricanes.
Since you did raise a political connection, I ask that you provide some details on attempts to "pay off scientists to increase data supporting global climate change" by the previous administration.
What do you mean by "increase" here? I assume that you are not saying that scientists were offered bribes to fabricate data. This would be far different from pressure to not report data, which has been alleged for the current administration.
In any case I have not heard this, so please respond with your sources, which will be valuable for other readers and may tempt them to join in this discussion.
Back to the original post: nowhere do I suggest that the media reported a connection between global climate conditions and increased hurricane activity. If anything, it was the opposite - decreased hurricane activity. In reality, I was addressing the fact that saharan sand stopping hurricanes could not be assumed - as the Univ. of Wisconsin press release clearly states - but which many media reports focused on as truth.
And I do agree that we don't yet have "enough knowledge to understand (fully at least) the underlying climactic issues involved in the recent weather phenomena." What we do have is data that I believe to be reliable indicators of climate change regardless of the cause.
Speculation about the Clinton administration attempting to "increase" the case for global climate change had originally reached me through several possible unreliable sources (other online blogs, mostly political in nature). It was later confirmed when James Hansen was interviewed on 60 Minutes. The segment was originally aired 19 March 2006. It includes many interesting bits on global climate change. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml
In the interview Hansen, arguably the most influential researcher involved in global climate change studies, blew the whistle on both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
I must state here that "increase" is used in my previous post exactly as you thought it could not have been meant to. Mr. Hansen states that while the Bush administration had placed pressure on researchers to suppress data on global climate change, the Clinton administration had done the exact opposite, allegedly encouraging scientists to report findings in such a way as to make climactic problems appear worse then the data would reflect.
I believe it is possible to purchase/rent these 60 Minute s episodes. However, I believe that there is a professor at La Salle who may have a copy and more information if you are interested. I am referring to Dr. William Price.
Cheers!
Thanks for the reference. I just read the excerpts at the 60 Minutes site. His details about what words were added to his recent reports, or which were taken away by Bush admin. officials is particularly troubling.
While Hansen does take both administrations to task - for opposite reasons - his research clearly convinces him that warming is due to human effects on the climate system. (As you know, he has stated this belief for many years.) Specifically, Hansen states that "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."
Do you agree with his position?
To be quite honest, as I sit here thinking how to reply, shuffling scenarios in my mind, I cannot let that dreadful feeling slip that we are doing things to our world, which are not only incredibly harmful and for lack of a more appropriate word, stupid, but also irreparable.
I certainly agree with Hansen and with findings documenting the current rapid changes to the global climate. In addition, I have had several interesting conversations with an astronomer at Penn who is not convinced that we have damned ourselves quite yet. According to him, we have no sure way of determining what the end result of these data will be. If the Earth warms 2 degrees centigrade in the next 50 years, is it really that bad of a thing? Is this not something that the our planet has dealt with before? Successfully?
I pushed him further, asking of his concern for wildlife. His response was cleanly organized and certainly something I found worth thinking out further on my own. Animal and plant species have forever been challenged by global climactic changes. Some die out, others evolve. This is the way things work in the complicated meshwork of the planet's ecosystem.
In other words, our planet is prepared for much more than humans could ever be doing to it right now. We have had five great extinctions on this planet and every time life has managed to "reboot" so to speak, and spawn new and wonderful creations.
There is some order in the chaos of the universe. But in the meantime, I think I'll continue to drive my Honda Civic: 40 miles to the gallon is a beautiful thing.
Some random thoughts...
Since my name was dropped by Andrzej (I think I know who you are)... a few thoughts. With as many variables as we are dealing with, the science of climate change and the predictions of impact on humans and wildlife are nearly impossibly complex. Although your friend from Penn is correct that species have historically evolved in response to a changing environment, the human element of this phenomenon changes the time domain so dramatically that evolution as we know it won't help most life forms (especially larger life forms) - adaptation might, but evolution won't. Humans can adapt to temperature changes and all that goes with them - wealthy people will adapt more readily than those in third world countries.
As a scientist, I definitely feel it is best to be skeptical, but not blind to reality. The temperatures and waters are rising. Land ice is turning into ocean water and the resulting land is less reflective hence more heat absorbed by Mother Earth. The perfect feedback mechanism. The chemistry of the atmosphere is changing in [CO2] (and other blanketing gasses) and that will not stop any time soon. This will surpass all historical CO2 ppm levels by over 50% (this is over 400,000 years). This can't NOT (a deliberate grammar error) affect the climate. However, one massive volcano will squash all predictions. We can blame the Democrats or the Republicans, but in the end, the change that is occurring is taking place at rates never witnessed by any form of life. Keep driving your Civic. I, too, don't want to rely on guzzling Mideast oil.
W.A. Price
huazi Look before you leap. First think, then act.http://www.celebritypurse.net/christian-dior-celebrity-purse-cb276.html