Hurricane size: correlated to its duration?

[LarryWx]

I'm wondering if the size of a hurricane (radii of TS and hurricane force winds) tends to be correlated with the duration of the storm.
In other words, if one looks back in history, do the largest storms tend to be the ones that form in the eastern Atlantic? I believe that Floyd, Gloria, Donna, and David were pretty large for example. On the other hand, the Labor Day cat. 5 storm that hit the FL Keys wasn't an eastern Atlantic storm and it was tiny. I don't think Camille was big. Do storms have some tendency to grow in size over time even if they are steady state with regard to highest winds? I'm not suggesting a perfect correlation by any means, only a tendency. What are the meteorological reasons for an increase in the size?

Any comments? I've never heard anything like this discussed. Thanks.

[LarryWx]

Over the last few minutes, I read a thread from another BB concerning this same subject. From this thread as well as from my own thoughts/experience, I'd like to hypothesize that as long as a hurricane isn't adversely affected too much by shear/cooler SST's/dry air/other adverse factors, etc, that the circulation size will TEND TO increase with time (assuming that its highest winds are pretty steady state or in other words that it has pretty much already maxed out in strength). This by no means implies anything close to a perfect correlation, but rather a partial correlation.

[ajaxw]

This topic is discussed somewhat in the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's Global Guide to Tropical Cyclone Forecasting under the subheading of 2.4 Outer Structure. This figure tends to support your assertion that storms do tend to increase in size with time:


Figure 2.13: Average changes of size and intensity of 12 recurving Atlantic hurricanes. The circle is the radius of the average outer closed isobar. (Merrill, 1984).

However, I notice that you have picked strong storms as your examples. It should be noted that:

it is possible, even common, to find small tropical cyclones with extremely high maximum winds and very large ones with weaker maximum winds.

Right off hand I can think of a few counterexamples. Neither Hurricane Mitch (1998) or Hurricane Gilbert (1988) were Cape Verde storms, but both and especially the latter were large.

[MBryant]

Let me add Carla as a carabean syatem that was huge.