Journal #7 - And now, part two

With regards to ACE, meteorologists were more split than with regards to the Saffir-Simpson scale. The biggest split seemed to appear between operational meteorologists (those working for the NHC) and research meteorologists (those working at universities and the HRD). Among the operational meteorologists, Stewart sees no reason to change ACE as is. And Franklin believes ACE is pointless because it refuses to differentiate between “tropical cyclone activity and tropical cyclone activity that matters”, or, that ACE gives to much weight to long lasting storms than storms that have any actual affect on the populace. This opinion changes amongst the research meteorologists, however. Prof. Bourassa believes that IKE (Integrated Kinetic Energy) makes significantly more sense than ACE, and ignoring storm size makes no sense; however, he notes the lack of data available is a limitation on the usage of IKE. Prof. Emanuel thinks ACE is decent, however, he prefers to use a method of “power dissipation” – power dissipation is basically the same as ACE, except for in power dissipation, the max wind speed is cubed (as opposed to squared in ACE). Prof. Klotzbach said he would not make any changes to ACE and that he preferred it greatly to the power dissipation method (as, he said, the power dissipation method would have a tendency of magnifying small errors). Prof. Evans saw a need for an alternative index, although she was not sure exactly what kind of index was needed, and suggested I take a look at Mark Powell’s paper on IKE. Aberson, as well, forwarded me the paper on IKE by Powell.