Hurricane Review For 2023

By Paul Homewood

All the official data is now published for global hurricanes last year:

https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch&loc=global

The figures clearly give the lie to claims that hurricanes are either becoming more frequent or more powerful.

Roger Pielke Jr & Ryan Maue have also updated their database of global landfalling hurricanes since 1970, available on Roger’s substack:

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/global-tropical-cyclones

Landfalling hurricanes are an important statistic, as they are not subject to the changing observational practices that mid-ocean storms have been in the past.

There has been an increasing trend since 1970 globally, and particularly in the North Atlantic & Western North Pacific, which account for two thirds of global hurricanes. But this trend disappears when the full dataset since 1950 is used. (The global dataset begins in 1970, because data on a global basis is not reliable before then.)

These trends bear out what I have long argued, and which hurricane experts have consistently said, that the frequency of major hurricanes was unusually low during the 1970s and 80s because of the cold phase of the AMO, which ended in the mid 1990s.