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Dean Grossmann's avatar

Again, great to see the data. Love the fact based analysis you bring to a very important topic. Possibly one typo...you say data from 1950-1922. Believe you mean 2022.

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Mike Weill's avatar

Great article. One story that might change the 1950-2022 trend though. In 2005 in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) we had Hurricane Katrina and Rita roughly a month apart. Two 500 to 1000 year hurricanes a month apart! Significant damage was done to many offshore platforms. Simplifying, offshore platforms are constructed with air gaps (water level to lowest deck) to withstand the 100 year storm with no damage and only minor damage in 1000 year storms (the platform should still be there in the morning). Given the 2005 storm season and damage done to many platforms we started wondering if we had the design basis incorrect. Of course the first hypothesis was storms were getting more severe. So the met-ocean folks dug into the data and sure enough we did have the severity data wrong, but NOT for the reason we thought. The problem was the data before 1960 or so. What happened in 1960? We started flying airplanes into storms. Before that the data was measured at the beach and extrapolated offshore. So, as an example, more Cat 5 storms offshore landed as Cat 2 than we thought.

Not sure how the severity data Roger shows was observed, but if storm severity was measured at the beach, then the older data is biased to weaker storms, and lower severe to total ratios, further making the case in this paper.

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