Accuracy of past hurricane counts good

[Ptarmigan]

I do not how accurate this study is. Well considering before the 1960s, we did not have satellites and most of the reports were from ships at sea. I remember WXMan57 citing a study in which on average two storms are missed, in which some seasons it is more.

http://www.physorg.com/news115288117.html

[Calasanjy]

We may never be able to definitively say how many storms some pre-1960 seasons had. In the EPAC this is even moreso the case because most storms there head northwest into the open waters of the Pacific without making landfall, and I don't know how much shipping and other boating was/is conducted in that basin. For the Atlantic, I'd say it is fairly safe to assume that depending on the activity of each season, approximately an additional two storms may have gone unnoticed, perhaps even more. Sediment deposits will, obviously, only indicate a storm if it made landfall or passed very close to land.

[somethingfunny]

I don't see how the 1933 season could have no storms forming east of 50W

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1933 ... on_map.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1969 ... on_map.png

1969 (18/12/5) included approximately 3 storms that seemingly would have been missed in 1933 (21/10/5) before sattelites were prevalent.

The model, trained on the tropical storm occurrence information from 1944 to 2006 showed an undercount before 1944 of 1.2 storms per year. When the researchers considered a possible undercount of three storms per year, their model predicted too few storms total. The model only works in the range of around 1.2 undercounted storms per year with the climate data available. The model was statistically significant in its findings.

"Fifty percent of the variation in storm numbers from one year to the next appears to be predictable in terms of the three key climate variables we used," says Mann. "The other 50 percent appears to be pure random variation. The model ties the increase in storm numbers over the past decade to increasing tropical ocean surface temperatures.

That doesn't make sense to me. How can a climate model effectively estimate the number of fish storms that weren't noticed since they never affected land or heavily used shipping routes??? It would be nice to know how many storms won't affect land this year too!

In 1933 it's possible that Zeta, Delta, Vince, Lee, the unnamed STS, and possibly even Bret and Gert would have been missed or misclassified...or at any rate, more than 1-2 storms. I'd rather wait for the NHC historical reanalysis project to be completed before making any conclusions regarding the number of hurricanes increasing over the time-span of centuries.

[KWT]

Exactly many of the NE Atlantic systems would have been classed as extra tropical if found at all, I mean unless a ship went right into the eye of the system then storms like Epsilon would have just been thought of as an exceptional cold cored low that we sometimes do get in the late autumn. Vince would have probably also been clasased ET if found, as would Delta and Zeta so thats at least 4 systems that likely wouldn't have counted, nor would have the subtropical storm, so thats 5 more you can add on to the 1933 season.

Who knows though really!

[Ptarmigan]

I tend to think there were seasons comparable and even more active than 2005. The years I think they are comparable to and more active to 2005 are:
1886
1887
1893
1899
1933
1936

[Cryomaniac]

1933 was almost certainly as active as 2005, unfortunately, I don't think it's likely there will ever be any evidence for it.