Hurricanes May Be The Norm, says New Study
Monday, June 11, 2007 at 09:47AM 
You mean I gotta get used to this?The recent increase in the number of major Atlantic hurricanes may just be a return to the norm after a period of unusually low storm frequency, say researchers.
Johan Nyberg of the Geological Survey of Sweden and colleagues used marine sediment cores of coral samples from the northeast Caribbean to build a proxy record of wind shear and sea-surface temperatures since 1730, and from this they estimated hurricane activity since that time.
The team found that the frequency of major hurricanes decreased gradually from the 1760s, reaching an all-time low in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, numbers of large hurricanes have started to climb again, leading to several very active hurricane seasons. Most notable amongst these was the summer of 2005, which culminated in the devastation of New Orleans in the US by hurricane Katrina (see Hurricane season refuses to blow over).
In 2005, Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology, US, published a study showing that the frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones has almost doubled globally since the early 1970s (Science, vol 309, p 1844).
Nyberg says that, when considered in the context of the past three centuries, this sudden burst of large hurricanes is simply a return to the norm.
Source: The New Scientist
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