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There has been a 12 year long period when no major hurricane has hit the continental USA. Climate sceptics, especially American ones, have used this fact to make claims about global warming. This was a bit odd as hurricane activity does seem to have increased as temperatures, especially sea surface temperatures have increased - though the IPCC is very cautious about this simply stating "that it is likely that the global frequency of tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged, concurrent with a likely increase in both global mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed and rain rates". There is now some evidence this isn't correct and hurricane frequency is in fact increasing, at least in the North Atlantic. Link So why the hurricane drought ... it may just have been chance. And now those dice, which up to now have made landfalls in the US unlikely seem to have started rolling the other way. Click this link. Press the words Earth in the bottom left hand corner and press the > icon in the control line of the dialogue box. That is Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas. It has caused huge damage and caused some of the worst flooding the US has ever seen. Now ... Click this link. This is a supercomputer weather computer output for the 10th of September at 18:00 GMT centred on Florida. You can one again click the words Earth and use the <<, <, > or >> icons to move the storm backwards or forwards in time. It shows what Hurricane Irma might do to Miami and the rest of Florida. This is the image for the current time, with the wind graphics on. Now this is a projection and we all now supercomputers can get it wrong and so it might not be quite as bad, though what it is doing to the Caribbean is pretty frightening. But it is pretty clear the predictions are for a pretty huge storm. The best forecasts for Harvey came from the output of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts - the European group responsible for weather forecasting, whose prediction accuracy considerably outperformed both the Met Office and the US's NOAA forecasts. The Europeans forecast for what Irma might do is this: Which isn't that different from the the projections I linked to above which come from NOAA, Oh, boy. What is going to happy to Miami and Eastern Florida? This could really be a monster storm ... weather watchers sit tight ... while if you are in Eastern Florida, I'd leave now, while if you own property there I'd check your flood and building insurance and get boarding up the windows. A Wind is coming ...
