Some Storms Are Getting Names That Don't Deserve Them

I had a previous post on the rough few years that the hurricane experts are having as they attempt to predict a season's activity. Today there's another story about how there seems to be a rush to name storms that aren't really strong enough to deserve them. Could it be an effort to make things appear worse than they are?

With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.

Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year's 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn "named storm" status.

"They seem to be naming storms a lot more than they used to," said Frank, who directed the hurricane center from 1974 to 1987 and is now chief meteorologist for KHOU-TV. "This year, I would put at least four storms in a very questionable category, and maybe even six."

Most of the storms in question briefly had tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 mph. But their central pressure — another measure of intensity — suggested they actually remained depressions or were non-tropical systems.

Any inconsistencies in the naming of tropical storms and hurricanes have significance far beyond semantics.

The number of a season's named storms forms the foundation of historical records used to determine trends in hurricane activity. Insurance companies use these trends to set homeowners' rates. And such information is vital to scientists trying to determine whether global warming has had a measurable impact on hurricane activity.

Bingo. The high priests of global warming need lots of hurricanes in order to keep up the scary rhetoric. Naming marginal storms certainly helps make the season look more severe than it really was. According to some experts there were six storms that had high enough central pressure that they probably shouldn't have been named, and the first storm of the season was a subtropical system that they never used to name at all. That's a recent change in naming conventions.