Journal #8 - Thoughts and Reflections

With a lack of consensus amongst the professionals, it’s tough to say with a definite answer as to who is right and who is wrong. However, after reviewing the e-mails I’ve received from these meteorologists, I’ve come to a few conclusions. First, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with regard to maximum wind speed, should not be abandoned. The scale is simple, works well at warning the public, and is too historically important to avoid. Any ideas of changing it would make the scale either too complex or unusable with regards to the nearly 150 years of prior data. However, there seems to be as well a bubbling for another idea or method of determining hurricane energy. While some meteorologists like ACE, it makes little sense to just ignore storm size with regards to the calculation of accumulated cyclone energy. The index that seems to be the leading candidate to replace ACE would be IKE, but the crucial problem with IKE is that it requires information on tropical systems that is only available for certain storms at certain times. It is unlikely that we will have enough information to implement IKE within the next twenty years, and even then we may not be able to use it to its fullest extent. Therefore, I am proposing a middle ground – somewhere between IKE and ACE, at least until IKE can be used fully. Wind radii should be used in calculating an accumulated energy index, in such a method. The area of wind from 35kts to 49kts, from 50kts to 64kts, and from 64kts to the max wind speed for each storm should be calculated, and then multiplied by the square of the average wind speed for each area (42kts, 57kts, and (maxkt + 64kts)/2) to get a basic general accumulated cyclone energy for each six hour period of a tropical system.