Lack of Heat needed to be transported?

[Alyono]

I wonder if the reason we are seeing a very quiet season globally this year is because we simply have no need for TCs this year.

A TCs main purpose is to transport heat from the tropics to the poles. I am wondering if the earth is simply in better balance this year. What I mean is, do we have less heat in the tropics or more heat in the higher latitudes such that the need for transport has been greatly reduced?

If that is the case, it may not matter about how favorable conditions become... we simply won't have a need for TCs

[RL3AO]

Sounds like a masters or PhD. thesis that needs to be started.

I know there are many on here to like to track tropical cyclones. I'm one of them. However, I've found the past few seasons interesting from the fact that global TC activity is quite low. If you are right that the Earth just doesn't have the need for them right now, it makes me wonder if this is a cyclical thing? How long is the carry over? Is the atmosphere still it "good shape" from the 2004-2008 period? Or is it more short term and something happening this year?

[hurricaneCW]

I think it would make sense if the entire globe was heated evenly or at least the northern hemisphere, but clearly the tropics are going to much warmer than the waters up north even with above normal anomalies in the polar regions, so I doubt this is the reason. And it's not like this is the first year this has ever happened either with very warm anomalies to the north.

I actually think the longer the waters remained untapped, the more severe the autumn and winter seasons will be (storm wise) because the differences with be much greater between the cold air from the north and the warm ocean waters. This is especially true with events like nor'easters that strongly depend on that gradient for strength.

It will be interesting to see how things progress. Maybe it's just a quiet year for all the basins, which happens every now and then, we'll see.

[NDG]

Sounds like a good theory if you ask me but in that case there would had not been any hurricanes in the middle of the last decade when the high latitudes of the northern Hemisphere were so warm.
Besides, hasn't the north pole being colder this summer than previous years?

[Cyclenall]

I don't like this theory at all, doesn't make sense to me. How can that stop a physical process from occurring? If favorable conditions exist, it should occur whether the north needs heat transported or not. At worst, it would create a new imbalance but I don't think it can override a physical process. Also, the heat is building down there quite a bit now so...

[hurricanetrack]

I actually spoke at length with Dr. Chris Landsea about this topic and he suggested that tropical cyclones are not really the "get the heat out of the tropics" engines that so many have believed them to be over the years. Mike Watkins was there with me, it was last September at the NHC. I'll have to recall deeper what he said but the idea of tropical cyclones being efficient heat transporters seems to be less than what we thought....

[gatorcane]

Is it possible that there is some correlation with the amount of shear / (Upper-Level Lows) ULLs and the amount of latent heat there is available? I would think the more shear and ULLs, the less latent heat available since shear involves strong upper-level winds that act similar to strong low-level winds which keeps latent heat from building over the ocean surface. Also I thought that ULLs generally create "cold air" in the upper-layers of the atmosphere thus reducing latent heat. On the other-hand the less shear and ULLs, the more latent heat available, and the more tropical systems (hurricanes) are needed to transport this excess heat out of the tropical regions? This year we have seen alot of shear and upper-level lows across most of the MDR (Mean-Development Region) which may have reduced the amount of latent heat available and could be why there are less hurricanes at the moment.

[Alyono]

to get low shear, you would need low temperature gradients over a large area. The thermal wind equation states that shear is a function of horizontal temp gradients.

Get a large area with a large amount of heat... you wont have shear