A Tropical Cyclone Nursery

The next four storms on CycloneCenter are new ones from the Western Pacific basin. They represent four storms that each start in a small region of the Pacific Ocean, but follow very different paths.

Ever wondered what happened to the baby that was shared time with you in the hospital nursery when you were born? Born in the same hospital on the same day, you have likely taken very different paths (unless you’re a twin).

Chalk it up to chaos (remember this wacky definition of it?) or something else, but it is interesting that — like babies in a hospital — tropical cyclones with similar origins take different paths as well. These storms — Kulap, Roke, Sonca and Nesat — formed in roughly the same location of the western Pacific Ocean in 2005 however they took very different paths.

Help us better understand their lifetime by classifying the Four Storms.

http://www.cyclonecenter.org/

Also thanks for your help on the fours storms from 2004. They were a great success and the initial results look very good.

Early results for Charley and Frances

What a week we had! We had envisioned many classifications, but received so many more! So far we have received more than 11,000 classifications from nearly 2000 users in June. These storms had never been analyzed on CycloneCenter and Hurricane Charley was completed on the first day! Hurricane Frances is nearly complete now. We will likely have more completely new storms this month.

Learning algorithms

There are numerous crowdsourced science projects out there and each have the same goal:

A Quiet Hurricane Season in the Atlantic?

The official start of the hurricane season in the North Atlantic was June 1 and most experts are predicting a relatively quiet season, pointing to relatively cool water temperatures in place and a developing El Nino in the Pacific.   El Nino can be thought of as a substantial warming of ocean water in the central and/or eastern Pacific which in turn alters global weather patterns.  Atlantic hurricanes typically encounter more hostile atmospheric conditions during El Nino events, limiting their potential to develop and strengthen.  Most of the inactive seasons in the Atlantic over the past 20 years have occurred during El Nino events.