Here's a detail that I missed:
Felix now holds the record for shortest time for an Atlantic storm to intensify to Category 5 strength. Felix required just 51 hours to reach Category 5 strength after it started as a tropical depression. That is a truly remarkable intensification rate, considering most tropical cyclones take 3-5 days to organize into a Category 1 hurricane.
As I said in my last post--you can look at these anomalies and just shrug, but Thomas Kuhn knew well that if you get enough anomalies, you sometimes get a paradigm shift.
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This picture shows
href="http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/float1.html" rel="tag">Hurricane
Felix 2007 after attaining category 5 status. You
can see a video of it, growing as it approaches Central America, at the
NOAA site,
href="http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/flt/t1/sloop-wv.html">here…
My latest "Storm Pundit" post is up at the Daily Green. Using Wikipedia and outher sources, I've cobbled together the records apparently set or otherwise affected by this storm. It's quite a staggering list:
1. Fastest intensification from a tropical depression to a Category 5 hurricane --…
With a storm like Felix out there, I've been spreading it around in terms of my blogging. I've just posted about the storm at both The Daily Green and The Huffington Post. Here's the gist from the latter post:
To be sure, it might be the case that there's a natural up-and-down cycle in the Atlantic…
UPDATE (Aug 30th)
Irma is a new named storm in the Eastern Atlantic. See this post for details, eventually.
UPDATE (Aug 29th)
There is a system currently raining on Cabo Verde, off the West Coast of Africa (nee Cape Verde) that is expected to develop. It is on the verge of becoming a tropical…
51 hours from inception to 5 is impressive enough, but most of that time was spent building up from depression to 2. The really scary speed was from Cat 2 to Cat 5 in just several hours!
Chris,
If a paradigm shift happens, you won't have to point it out.
I know you don't mean to be self-serving, and I agree that the data are suggestive of a climate transition, but this post has a bit too much of that look-what-I-discovered flavor.
Perhaps you need to re-frame your comments :)
In the buisness of weather, we donote anything that intensifies at a rate of 2hPa/hour (mBar in silly units) "explosive" development... otherwise known as a bomb.
Felix intensified at a rate of 3.4hPa/hour. That's almost twice our usual criteria for rapid intensification. This storm is really something else.
It's a long time since I read Kuhn, but isn't the point that anomalies left to themselves *don't* trigger paradigm shifts -- that normal science can continue unabated despite effectively any number of such things. Indeed, IIRC it's the lack of any internal account for the paradigm shift, anomaly based or otherwise, that sits at the heart of a) the notion of incommensurability and b) the love/hate relationship between Kuhn and SSK.