2007 Ace and how lopsided it is

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

2007 Ace and percentage of ace

Above one point of Ace
Dean 33.8
Felix 16.5
Humberto 1.37

Under 1 point of Ace
Gabrielle .970
Barry .773
Ingrid .773
Chantal .608
Erin .368

Felix and Dean own 50.3 ace...While the rest of the systems put together own 4.862 ace. That is for the season 55.162 overall ace.

Dean and Felix as of 9-15-2007 percentage of the ace is 91.18596-> percent. Ingrid takes up a whole 1.4 percent of this seasons ace. The same as Barry. These calc I've made is off Wik data on the 2007 season ace page.

Hurricane Dean takes up 66.27 percent of this seasons Ace.
Hurricane Felix takes up 29.9 or rounded to 30 percent.
Hurricane Humberto takes up 2.48 or rounded to 2.5 percent of the ace.

So this season as been lopsided.

[Buck]

Yes. I've been contributing to calculating it some on wikipedia... it drives me crazy how lopsided it is!

[artist]

can you explain what ace is? thanks

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

Energy a tropical cyclone puts out. So a weak tropical storm gets about .134 Ace per Advisory, while the cat5 gets about 2 points of Ace for each Advisory. So the longer the system lives and the higher/stronger it is, the higher the ace is.

[artist]

thank you Matt - that was a great explanation! Very interesting to see how that is figured.

[RL3AO]

ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is a better tool for identifying how active a season is over just # of storms.

[Honeyko]

So this season as been lopsided.

But wouldn't it be comparable to any other season with a couple big storms and a mess of weak ones? Seasons with a single huge storm and only a few other weak ones would be even more lopsided (e.g. 1992 w/Andrew).

If Ingrid survives and eventually develops into a Cat-2 hurricane that stays at that level for several days while recurving up the eastern seaboard and doesn't puke until halfway to Ireland, then the season would be plain-vanilla average. Dean and Felix were cat-5s, but only briefly. They weren't cat-4s for that long either compared to storms with long central Atlantic run-ups. There's probably at least two to four more TS and "fishcanes" left in the season.

[WindRunner]

The technical definition of how ACE is calculated involves squaring the wind speed at each 6-hr advisory (or from the 6-hr best track points, if available) and adding each value up over the life of the storm. Only periods of time at which a system was fully tropical and had winds of 35kts or greater are included in the calculations - in other words, all subtropical and extratropical stages are excluded as are depressions.

[Honeyko]

They should chuck the tenths decimal fraction, however, since it's buried within the statistical noise of error (which, also, due to the squaring, results in massive amplification of error with the strongest storms; for example, a 150msw hurricane which is actually 160msw produces an error of 160^2 - 150^2 = 3100, while a 50msw TS which is actually 60msw produces error of only 1100).

It's a species of false precision.