kevin wrote:NotSparta wrote:gatorcane wrote:If this somehow gets to a depression or name storm status, which it shouldn’t, it would just inflate the numbers considering something this minor was not tracked or counted decades ago.
What's the point of having new and better technology if we don't use it?
Exactly. It's not the fault of current technology that not all storms could be tracked in the past. While I can understand the annoyance of some people that compared to older seasons the more recent ones seem 'inflated' due to better technology, I don't think we should just ignore these small storms because of that. Just because our technology was insufficient in the past to track some of the storms doesn't mean we should just keep ignoring them now that we can actually detect them. That would mean artificially skewing data to 'what feels right', which is definitely not something I would ever advocate for in any field of science. If it's a TS then it's a TS and the fact that storm tracking and detecting technology was worse in the past shouldn't have anything to do with that. Of course we should keep these things in mind when analyzing and comparing data from seasons in different time periods. Just a general comment btw, not specifically about 91L and its chances of becoming a TD/TS.
Well, said, Kevin -- well said.
I think that most of the problem here comes with unrestrained or unqualified (to be polite about it) comparisons with the historical tropical-storm record. OF COURSE there are more storms identified now than in the past, because we can monitor the whole bloody planet on a virtually continuous basis. That doesn't necessarily mean that something major has changed in the dynamics of Earth's meteorology, although that coincidentally could be possible. As with just about anything else, we should use the new capability to its current limits and then try to extend those limits through research, work, and ingenuity. But higher numbers of storms (or whatever) shouldn't be hyped without acknowledging what allowed us to get those higher numbers in the first place -- a caveat that just doesn't seem to register with a lot of people, I'm afraid.
Getting back to 91L -- I'm wondering if it's the first subtle indication that the VP200 effects of the MJO are arriving in that neck of the woods...