aren't concerned about greenhouse gasses... you?? READ THE LAST PARAGRAPH. Here is your politicization Lush... read it and weep.
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.htmlIn an earlier modeling study, the NOAA group simulated samples of hurricanes from both the present-day climate and from a greenhouse-gas warmed climate. This was done by "telescoping-in" on coarsely resolved tropical storms in GFDL's global climate model using the high-resolution GFDL hurricane prediction model (Figure 2). A research report by T. Knutson, R. Tuleya and Y. Kurihara describing this work was published in the Feb 13, 1998 issue of Science, with a more detailed paper in Climate Dynamics (1999, vol. 15).
In a follow-up study, which appeared in the June 2001 issue of Journal of Climate, NOAA scientists Knutson and Tuleya teamed up with Isaac Ginis and Weixing Shen of the University of Rhode Island to explore the climate warming/ hurricane intensity issue using hurricane model coupled to a full ocean model. The coupled model was used to simulate the "cool SST wake" generated by the hurricanes as they moved over the simulated ocean (Figure 3). The model simulations including this additional feedback still showed a similar percentage increase of hurricane intensity under warm climate conditions as the original model without ocean coupling.
The most recent and comprehensive study by Knutson and Tuleya, published in Journal of Climate in September 2004 (download paper), confirms the general conclusions of previous studies but makes them more robust by using future climate projections from nine different global climate models and four different versions of a new higher-resolution version of the GFDL hurricane model. According to this latest study, an 80 year build-up of atmospheric CO2 at 1%/yr (compounded) leads to roughly a one-half category increase in potential hurricane intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale and an 18% increase in precipitation near the hurricane core. A 1%/yr CO2 increase is an idealized scenario of future climate forcing. As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is considerable uncertainty in projections of future radiative forcing of earth's climate.
An implication of these studies is that if the frequency of tropical cyclones remains the same over the coming century, a greenhouse-gas induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms.