No, 2020 Was Likely Not a Record Hurricane Season
By
H. Sterling Burnett -
November 13, 20200
The title of a recent Washington Post story about hurricanes makes a bold but likely erroneous claim, “2020 Atlantic hurricane season breaks all-time record while leaving Gulf Coast battered.†The Post is not alone in confidently, but likely wrongly, asserting the 2020 hurricane season has broken records. The New York Times and the Guardian, for example, published similar stories. The evidence indicates, however, 2020’s purported hurricane record is largely an artifact of our greater ability to discover and track storms now. Also, there have been recent changes in the criteria used for naming tropical storms and hurricanes.
According to the Post, “No previous season since reliable records began more than a century ago had this many named storms.†The Post’s claim is highly misleading.
In a recent From the Stacks podcast, Dr. Neil Frank, who served as director of the United States National Hurricane Center longer than anyone before or since, said the criteria for declaring a weather front a name tropical storm has loosened in recent years. Frank says under the old system, many of the named storms in 2020, particularly tropical storms of short duration, would not have been given names.
https://climaterealism.com/2020/11/no-2020-was-likely-not-a-record-hurricane-season/
