Journal #12 – Possible uses of RACE

Now that I’ve developed an update to ACE, I’d like to mull over some of the possibilities for this formula. First and foremost, RACE will be used to calculate the accumulated cyclone energy for both storms and hurricane seasons, as ACE does in its current capacity. RACE would simply be a much more accurate measurement of the accumulated cyclone energy. However, the potential for RACE extends beyond a simple recalculation of what ACE was used for – RACE can be expanded to new areas of hurricane energy. One possible usage of RACE would be as a sort of corollary to the Safir-Simpson Scale – certain values of RACE would correlate to different categories of storm intensity. However, this scale would not be ranking storms merely on their maximum potential damage (as done by Safir-Simpson currently). Storms would be ranked on their overall damage potential – how much damage a cyclone could do over a wide enough area. Generally speaking, a larger cyclone will cause more damage than an equally strong small cyclone – there is larger area of ocean that is affected by the water, which leads to a greater storm surge; the increase wind field means that damage is caused over a larger land area; the larger storm size means more total water content and can lead to more flooding. In this way, RACE would be a helpful tool in determining the overall destructive power of a storm, which would be helpful in allocating resources or emergency services to affected areas, prior to a storm.