Quote:
Originally Posted by jimjamuser
Damage to the world in terms of deaths and infrastructure destruction. That is INCREASING.
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Actually hurricane intensity is measured by either by the drop in barometric pressure or wind speed. Damage (either in terms of lives lost or infrastructure destroyed) isn't an accurate measurement of a hurricane's intensity for several reasons; 60% of major Atlantic hurricanes never even make landfall in the United States (NASA dot gov); many of them just blow themselves out over water. And a major hurricane blowing itself out over water or making landfall over a relatively deserted area will not result in much destruction.
Nor are the number of lives lost a true indication of a hurricane's intensity. When most people think of lives lost in a hurricane the word that pops into (I'm assuming) most peoples' minds would be "Katrina", and it was indeed deadly, but the majority of the 1,800 lives lost were lost because of flooding resulting from fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system. Katrina made landfall on the gulf coast not as a category 5 megastorm, as most people think, but as a category 3.
If we're measuring hurricane deaths, then the most deadly Atlantic hurricane on record was over 240 years ago; Huracán San Calixto, AKA the Great Hurricane of 1780, which killed over 22,000 in the lesser Antilles chain. Actually the toll was probably much larger; the Antilles' main crop was sugar cane which meant that a lot of slaves were killed as well. This is just a guess on my part but I don't think those slaves were counted as "people" at the time.
Much of what we know about hurricanes, and how they are spotted and tracked, is the result of satellite technology and that is only about 60 years old. Records before that cannot be said to be anywhere near as complete as today, and of course counting back the years before the advent of aviation to 1859 (when as I recall the first attempts were made at record-keeping) it is self-evident that the older the record, the less accurate it was likely to be.
Much of what we think we know about hurricanes seems to be based on speculation. Maybe, by 2122, the next hundred years of complete data will yield some reliable science regarding them, but at this point I don't think anyone can claim that hurricane science much more than educated guesses.