Hurricane Frequency Highest In 1,000 Years

Hurricane Frequency Highest In 1,000 Years

By PATRIK JONSSON
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 16, 2009
Big Tropical Storms in Atlantic Hit 1,000-Year High
Study Suggests Hurricane Frequency Has Increased Dramatically; Climate Change a Potential Culprit


The people of U.S. Gulf Coast have felt unusually battered by big storms during the past few years. Now, it turns out their instincts are right.
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First named storms of hurricane season have experts warning to be prepared.

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A new report in the scientific journal Nature indicates that the last decade has seen, on average, more frequent hurricanes than any time in the last 1,000 years. The last period of similar activity occurred during the Medieval Warm Period.

The study is not definitive, but it is a unique piece of work that combines an analysis of sediment cores from inland lakes and tidal marshes with computer modeling and finds a "striking consistency" between the two, the authors suggest.

The use of sediment cores to place and date ancient storms -- called "paeleotempestology" -- is becoming an increasingly useful tool in the broader effort to try to reconstruct the history of hurricane activity in order to better predict a future potentially influenced by climate change.




"You don't want to go into the business of predicting the future without knowing the history, which does tell us what's possible and tests our understanding," says Richard Alley, a Pennsylvania State climate change researcher. "When people build models to predict hurricanes in the future, one way you know it works is to wait 100 years and say, 'See.' Or you run it against the previous 1,000 years."



The massive hurricanes that have battered the Gulf Coast during the past decade have become a focal point of the climate change debate. Some scientists have suggested that the growing ferocity and frequency of storms is tied to rising ocean temperatures, some of which may be caused by human activity.

The new report, written by Penn State University paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and several colleagues, likely won't resolve that debate, says climatologist Jim Kasting, also at Penn State.

"There is some evidence that [climate change] is adding to hurricane strength, but there's no evidence it's tied to increased hurricane frequency," he says. "Questions about whether hurricanes will increase in intensity or frequency are really difficult to answer from a modeling standpoint. [That's why] it is very important to try to have an understanding of how storm frequency and intensity has varied in the past."


http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/JustOneThing/story?id=8332131&page=1


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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090813083329.htm



Ceramatec: Bringing Distributed Power Storage to Your Home
Written by Philip Proefrock on 17/08/09
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A company in Utah is developing a battery system for home-based electricity storage that may make energy storage much easier and more economical for off-the-grid homes as well as helping to improve the efficiency of grid-tied homes. The technology being developed by Ceramatec is a new variation on sodium sulfur batteries, an existing technology with very high energy density, but best suited for very large scale, industrial style installations such as grid storage. However, these batteries have the potential to bring the advantages of sodium sulfur batteries to a much wider range of uses.

Currently, sodium sulfur batteries operate at very high temperatures - above 300 degrees C (572 degrees F), and the components in them are corrosive. This isn't the sort of thing that you would want in your home, and, for efficiency, they work best at a much larger size; they aren't really at a home-scale size. On the other hand, there are some advantages to sodium sulfur batteries. They use very common and inexpensive materials, which makes them attractive. And the high energy density means that a small battery is all that is needed for a large amount of energy storage.

The Ceramatec battery separates the sulfur and sodium from each other with a thin ceramic membrane which allows electricity to be stored while operating at a much lower temperature. Ceramatec envisions a refrigerator-sized unit that would remain below 98 degrees C (208 degrees F), the melting point of sodium. Keeping the sodium solid makes for a much safer battery. The battery could store 20 kWh worth of energy, either from local, sustainable sources such as wind or solar, or from off-peak recharging from the grid, much like a plug-in hybrid car recharges when the grid demand is low.

http://ecogeek.org/component/content/article/2910