Saturday, December 31, 2005

Tropical Storm Zeta

This must be pretty abnormal (will it last until January?), but I don't know how significant it really is.

Reuters says there have been 6 recorded hurricanes in December, including Epsilon this year. Zeta doesn't seem likely to strengthen enough to add to that tally.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

On its own I doubt Zeta means much. However:

Including hurricanes, I can find 6 tropical storms that formed in December. These occured in 1953, 1954, 1984, 2003, 2003, and 2005.

There is a fair amount of end point bias in saying 3 in 50 years then 3 in 5 years is a 10 fold increase.

Nevertheless when combined with all the other records see
Wiki list. It looks like there will be 20 out of 46 records held by 2005 and no other year holding more than 3. While I wouldn't want to be responsible for working out the autocorrelation of holding different records, the level of domination of those records does make me wonder if there is enough to suspect something is happening.

crandles